daveinboca

European "Lifestyle" Threatens Solvency

2012-01-27T21:10:00.002-05:00

The Economist has an excellent article on the same subject I was blogging on before I was rudely interrupted by my wife. Three months after my last post, Europe and the Euro seems poised even more to plunge into the depths, with all its social and other protections and impedimenta intact.

At the moment, the imperious Brussels unelected gnomocracy will continue to arrange deck chairs on the sinking Titanic, but soon the era of bloated social protections, from pensions to health, education and unemployment benefits will disappear as surely as the great ocean liner did into the dark waters of the Atlantic 100 years ago in April.

Sauve qui peut.

Financial Times: Say Bye-bye to Eurozone?

2011-10-23T22:21:00.002-04:00

Wolfgang Munchau and Martin Wolf [and at the time, Amity Shlaes until she graduated to the WSJ] were the first columns I would turn to when the Financial Times was delivered to my door a couple years before sending my daughter to U of Miami rendered me impecunious [even tho she qualified for scholarship aid, etc.]. Here's the lead para and due to the FT's stringent copyright rules, you'll have to link to the column to read the rest.

It is time to prepare for the unthinkable: there is now a significant probability the euro will not survive in its current form. This is not because I am predicting the failure by European leaders to agree a deal. In fact, I believe they will. My concern is not about failure to agree, but the consequences of an agreement. I am writing this column before the results of Sunday’s European summit were known. It appeared that a final agreement would not be reached until Wednesday. Under consideration has been a leveraged European financial stability facility, perhaps accompanied by new instruments from the International Monetary Fund.

After some technical details, Wolfgang cuts to the chase:

The simple reason why there can be no technical quick fix is that the crisis is, at its heart, political. The triple A-rated countries have left no doubt that they are willing to support the system, but only up to a certain point. And we are well beyond that point now. If Germany continued to reject an increase in its own liabilities, debt monetisation through the European Central Bank and eurobonds, the crisis would logically end in a break-up. There is no way the member states of the eurozone’s periphery can sustainably service their private and public debts, and adjust their economies at the same time.
Each of Germany’s red lines has some justification on its own. But together they are toxic for the eurozone. The politics is not getting any easier. The behaviour of the Bundestag underlines the political nature of the crisis. Last month’s ruling of the Germany’s constitutional court strengthened the role of parliament. But it also reduced the autonomy of the German chancellor, who now has to seek prior approval by the Bundestag’s budget committee before negotiating in Brussels. This power shift will not prevent agreements, such as the one currently negotiated, but it will make it harder to co-ordinate policy in the European Council on an ongoing basis.

Is Europe heading for a catastrophe, though they are experts always in not calling a catastrophe a "catastrophe."

Policy co-ordination among heads of state is both undemocratic and ineffective. A monetary union may require more than just a eurobond and a small fiscal union. It may require a formal, if partial, transfer of sovereignty to the centre – that includes the rights to levy certain taxes, impose regulation in product, labour and financial markets, and to set fiscal rules for member states.
Under normal circumstances, European electorates would not accept such a massive transfer of sovereignty. I would not completely exclude the possibility that they might accept it if the alternative was a breakdown of the euro. Even then, I would not bet on such an outcome. Current policy is leading us straight towards this bifurcation point, which may only be a few weeks or months away.
The biggest danger now is the large number of politicians drawing red lines in the sand, and the lack of even a single EU authority willing and capable of cutting through them. Given the multiple uncertainties, there is no way to attach any precise probabilities to any scenarios. But clearly, the chance of a catastrophic accident is bigger than merely non-trivial. The main consequences of leverage will be to increase that probability.

Anyone who believes that all the Eurozone members will vote to cede some more sovereignty to the faceless arrogant unelected gnomes of Brussels has my sympathy and should see their local pharmacist.

Michael Lewis's recent Vanity Fair article that quoted a German economist who predicted catastrophe if the Germans ever abandoned the Deutschmark is a prophet.

And those in the UK calling for their adoption of the euro should head for more than a pharmacist, because intensive psychiatric treatment is the only way to treat delusional disorders of that magnitude.

Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz Dies, Prince Nayef now Crown Prince

2011-10-22T22:09:00.004-04:00

Religious Zealot?

Prince Sultan was Secretary of Defense in Saudi Arabia [technically MODA or "Ministry of Defense and Aviation,"] when I served for two years as the Political/Military Officer in the American Embassy in Saudi Arabia. My job was to get to know the top military colonels in their forties who had received American educations and were primed for future high commands, as well as watch over the incredible increase in American "security assistance" which burgeoned in the late seventies after the Saudis hit the OPEC jackpot and had more money than they knew how to spend.

Prince Sultan's son, Bandar bin Sultan, was one of my favorite interlocutors, as he had a Sudanese slave mother and thus had been excluded from the regular family tree, which basically consisted of lazy good-for-nothing layabouts who got senior commands because their daddy was MODA chief & they had a mommy with royal pedigree. Bandar, on the other hand, was born with princely pedigree, but an actual work ethic and a voracious desire to learn and excel---the rarest commodity in the Saudi Royal Family of Saud.

I also cultivated a number of young Saudi officers, several of whom rose to very high government positions later. I was commended by the American Ambassador Porter who had served under Henry Kissinger as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs in a special addendum to my "efficiency report" or report card, with a remark that of all the American officers in the Embassy, I had managed [partly through my Arabic language skills acquired at the Foreign Service Institute in Beirut] to get more information from the "working level" of my Saudi counterparts than any other officer [except of course for the legendary DCM, Hume Horan, who spoke perfect Arabic, though unfortunately with a Libyan accent--the equivalent in the USA of a hillbilly accent].

Indeed, the young officers were close to MODA Minister Sultan and when they came to Jeddah where I maintained a residence where they could "sleep over," they would immediately begin drinking beer, which they much preferred to hard liquor which was available everywhere in Riyadh and Dhahran and other military bases. My diplomatic status meant I could order cases of Carlsberg and other European beers unavailable inside the "Magic Kingdom," as we called it back then.

With tongues loosened, the young officers, or some of them, would tell naughty stories about their princely boss. Not only his massive corrupt practices, but his practice of marrying a young Saudi virgin for a forty-day training cruise, so to speak. If the young woman proved acceptable, she could join his collection of concubines. If not, she was sent off with a handsome retainer.

My favorite story, to speak ill of the dead, was of a distant relative of one of the young officers, who shared her dismay about the wedding night with the morbidly-obese prince who was also their Minister of Defense. As Prince Sultan maneuvered his portly frame on top of the fragile teenager, a door opened and an immense black man with an immensely huge extended private part approached the Prince's anus and began to insert same, which in turn gave the Prince himself a boost enabling congress with his supine teen bride. She shouted in fear and disgust and suddenly extracted herself before the process had even begun to proceed vigorously. She was immediately expelled from the bridal suite and sent home packing with a six-figure hush-money good-bye gift. I wrote this down for an airgram because of a lot of details about more venal forms of corruption going on and Ambassador Porter told me that if this airgram ever reached Foggy Bottom, it would arrive at the Israeli Embassy within hours and be the talk of the diplomatic circuit for months.

So we filed it in the circular file and now it can be told.

Sadly, the death of Sultan means that the fragile King Abdullah will be immediately succeeded by Prince Nayef, whom I am one of the few Americans to have met in the last three decades. Even with the disaster in the nineties when 19 Americans were killed by an Iranian-sponsored terror explosion in Dammam, FBI Director Louis Freeh had to wait for days to meet Prince Nayef, whom I met when visiting senior Ministers along with Ambassador John West, former governor of South Carolina. Prince Nayef looked at Ambassador West and almost refused to shake his hand. Prince Nayef is a true Salafist Wahhabi fanatic and hates Americans as the embodiment of spiritual and material evil. He hates Shi'ites as well, which might be to America's advantage were a confrontation with Iran to occur while he was King after Abdullah passes on, but otherwise, I am straining hard to think of any way that this America-hating senior prince, who is the ultimate unbending and uncompromising patriarch, could ever be persuaded to follow American advice, even on vital oil and military issues important to both countries.

This is being written late in the evening and tomorrow I will check my notes and my literature on the Royal Family----I own a dozen books on the subject and when I returned from Saudi, I was extensively debriefed in Langley about a number of remarks and such I'd written on State Dept. telegrams, so there is some residual stuff remaining in my mind. Let me sleep on it and in the meantime, let's wonder who's going to be the next Saudi Minister of Defense and Aviation.

My final thought before turning in. If Khalid bin Sultan, the head of the Saudi Armed Forces in the First Gulf War succeeds his deceased father, I can assure the gentle reader that one of my friends who was Khalid's PERSONAL BANKER during the war showed me one of the checks that Khalid received DAILY from the French food and other perishable materiel during the war. Even this cynical and hardened Saudi, [whose house I visited rather than meet Gen. Schwartzkopf because the two events coincided the same evening [and where I met many influential Saudis who whined that the Americans were hitting mosques in Baghdad during their occasional bombing runs there---all this while Iraqi Scuds were raining on RIyadh almost daily] was ashamed, in his own words and showed me a check for roughly one million dollars that he had just received and would deposit in Khalid's personal private account the very next morning.

Khalid bin Sultan had been extorting millions from Raytheon for its air defense system a decade before when I knew them in Jeddah----a guy named Ray Carver insulted me and the US Embassy in San Diego at a conference shortly after my return and then, six months later, absconded to Brazil with what Raytheon told me was "over fifteen million dollars."

Ray said the US Embassy was negligent and uncaring. Of course, he himself was very caring, of old number one & his family. He may still be rotting in Rio somewhere, but he and Khalid bin Sultan were the perfect marriage of American corruption and Saudi moral squalor---or vice versa, if you will.

All I can say is that King Abdullah will be remembered after he leaves us as, along with King Fahd, one of America's closest friends in the Middle East.

Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz, unless his personal views and virulent hatreds have subsided, will be difficult to deal with. And Barack Obama will have to shine this arrogant zealot's shoes to gain the slightest respect or even attention from the Salafist who would be King.

Steve Jobs Biography Reveals He Told Obama, 'You're Headed For A One-Term Presidency'

2011-10-22T02:40:00.003-04:00

Steve Jobs was far more than simply a business genius. He was a one-of-a-kind prophet. His remarks on Bill Gates being a second-ratee schemer and first-rate cat burglar of other peoples' technologies is right on the money.

But he is a realist when he says to Obungler: ""You're headed for a one-term presidency," he told Obama at the start of their meeting, insisting that the administration needed to be more business-friendly. As an example, Jobs described the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where "regulations and unnecessary costs" make it difficult for them.

Jobs also criticized America's education system, saying it was "crippled by union work rules," noted Isaacson. "Until the teachers' unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform." Jobs proposed allowing principals to hire and fire teachers based on merit, that schools stay open until 6 p.m. and that they be open 11 months a year."
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Fox News also covers the "one-term presidency" story which is being studiously avoided by the DNC-controlled lamestream MSM.

Memory Chalet: Tony Judt's Long Goodbye to "ALL THAT"

2011-10-21T17:16:00.002-04:00

Tony Judt is/was more than a great historian. After learning that he had ALS ["Lou Gehrig's Disease"], he demonstrated that as his faculties slowly waned until he was hardly able to move that his well-stocked mental cabinet was still full of brilliant asides on the strangeness of the Twentieth Century---about which his magisterial book Postwar remains the principal memoir I have read about how a continent which in thirty-one years [1914-1945]destroyed itself tried like the legendary Phoenix to rise from its own ashes.

We are now witnessing the Eurozone in the throes of an economic meltdown which may mean the ejection of Greece, which was rashly admitted into said monetary compact through the deceptive manipulations of Greek banks and government officials---all bearing witness to Virgil's famous line from the Aeneid, "Timeo Danaos, et dona ferentes." The Trojan Horse referred to is one of the PIIGS [Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece & Spain] now dragging the rest of Europe [and to a certain extent, North America & other parts of the EU] into some sort of fiscal/monetary black hole. Postwar should have won the Pulitzer for History, but Victor Navasky and the other leftist fascisti at the Pulitzer Board couldn't allow quality to outweigh ideology. And in his latter years, Tony Judt outgrew ideology just as somewhere in Memory Chalet he notes that "By the age of twenty, I had outgrown Marxism, Zionism and communitarian egalitarianism---no mean feat for a kid who grew up in Putney." Or words to that effect.

Judt's characteristic humanity and humility shines from every page. He is able to evoke his years at Ecole Normale Sup with effortless ease, in one case, dismissing the insufferable buffoon Bernard Henri-Levi with a diffident shrug. He reminds us of Arthur Clarke's long-ago comment in Childhood's End that, "in sum, the French are the world's best second-raters."

His years at Cambridge, coming from a background as lower class and humble as any student at that prestigious school, are similarly not remembered with elegiac intensity. And his childhood trips to the humblest chalet in Switzerland, where down-and-out British actors used to spend a month skiing during the off-season in London, are the source of the title. I would have loved to meet Rachel Roberts, then a struggling youngish actress, as described by young ten-year old Tony.

A sort of long wave from the rear platform of a train as it leaves a station to which it will never return, Tony's book is moving and wonderful, with the painful knowledge that it was published posthumously after his death in August 2010 the saddest elegy one can leave for oneself.

Marco Rubio Slammed by Washington Post Castro Commie

2011-10-21T15:00:00.003-04:00

Erick Erickson has a great riposte to the absurd Marxist moron who wrote a hit-piece on Marco Rubio, at the behest of the Commissars in Charge of the nation's second-worst source of "news," the editorial-on-the-front-page fiasco called the Washington Post.

Post fits in with my recent blog "May dogs eat your bones," because the attitude of a dog toward a post is as a good place to leave a yellow marker, which this lousy broadsheet is now become. A peeing spot for dogs, or an employment place for dogs like the Manuel Roig-Franzia, a real mutt with rabies, as his article on Marco manifestly exhibits.

Sayonara, the WaPo is going the way of the Redskins QB Rex Grossman, who showed his true colors last weekend when the YELLOW & Burgundy were trounced after Rex's four INTs...!

Matteo Ricci, S.J. Great Explorer Tipped for Sainthood?

2011-10-21T13:29:00.002-04:00

Matteo Ricci is well described in Jonathan Spence's great biography, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, as having a phenomenal gift for mnemonic devices, [i.e., things and methods to employ to increase one's power of memory]. But Pope John Paul II opened up the process for his beatification in 1984 and the project got a new boost in 2010. The man should be canonized for sheer brainpower alone, but he lived a pious life in Macau and Beijing, where he was the VERY FIRST FOREIGNER ever allowed to be buried---due to the Ming Emperor Wanli's admiration for his personal qualities.

Ricci was the second person to learn classical Chinese thoroughly, taught by his fellow Jesuit Fr. Ruggiero, and learned the entire Confucian code of an ethical life and the "Lord of Heaven" concept which accompanies Confucianism. He and some fellow Jesuits gained immense influence in the Imperial Court by predicting solar eclipses, which were highly important to the Chinese and one of the few arts this highly intelligent culture had yet to master.

In addition, Ricci built clocks and other western timepieces, and in his spare time constructed a map of the world so modern and detailed that it amazes scholars to this day that a man could have the erudition to do so. His ability to continually amaze and impress the most influential members of the Ming court led to the Emperor Wanli to consider one of history's greatest counterfactuals.

The Emperor, whom Ricci never met face-to-face because of his reclusive nature, was so influenced by the Empress about Ricci's preaching that Confucianism was a stepping-stone to Christianity, which adored "The Lord of Heaven" even more fervently than the Confucians, that he was said to have been willing to convert to Catholicism were the Mass to be recited in Chinese instead of the Latin language.

However, the Pope was persuaded by [jealous?] Dominican and Franciscan advisors that the Jesuits in China had acquired such immense influence by trimming elements of The True Faith to the sails of the Confucian tenets---hence what the Pope would be doing were he to approve this highly iffy exception to the universality of the Latin Mass, according to the Savonarolas surrounding the Pope, would be sanctioning another form of Protestantism or a heterodox form of Christianity at best.

And so this unsung geniuses near-brush with immortality was quashed by Roman courtiers whose Jansenist and Calvinist attitudes were already hampering the Jesuits' heroic efforts to launch an effective "Counter-Reformation" in countries already overrun by the Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican versions of Christianity. Luckily for the Jesuits, Poland remained faithful to Rome, largely out of their dislike of the Russian Orthodox and Saxony Lutheran enemies eager to carve up their Sejm, and the "eternal treaty of 1698 giving the Ukraine to Czar Peter the Great in perpetuity. But that's another story.

Ricci also had much influence on a Korean delegate to the Imperial Palace in Beijing, who brought back some Jesuit ideas to his country.

Like St. Francis Xavier, who was the first westerner to reach Japan, Ricci was a Jesuit priest whose love of God and learning combined to forge new avenues of communication between cultures long before globalization became a byword for post-modern diversity.

Let the Dogs Eat His Bones!!!

2011-10-20T18:37:00.002-04:00

Qaddafi is dead and all's just a little bit better on the planet. The curse in my headline is the worst one can use on a dead Muslim, according to the Chechens who have been fighting the Russians [for centuries, it seems].

My favorite Qaddafi story was from Basil Tsakos, a Greek arms dealer who was trying to close a deal on a sale of half-tracks to the Libyan loon. He had a personal appointment just around twilight, and was seated in a chair in the very end of a long tent with lights on the ground shining upward and illuminating the white silk of the long rectangular tent. Tsakos told me that there was a very long and expensive-looking white runner of a rug along the 150 feet of the tent, only about a yard and a half wide.

Tsakos waited and waited and waited and it wasn't until around 1100PM that he spied the tall figure of Col. Qaddafi striding all the way down the white rug with the lights shining up into his DIAPHANOUS silk see-through robe. He was wearing NOTHING beneath.

Needless to say, they conducted their business in an atmosphere of utter eerie sexual tension [though Tsakos was in his fifties at the time, he says.] Watching this forty-year old walking 50 yards down a long runway rug with lights shining up onto his naked body proved to Tsakos that Qaddafi was either a madman or a pervert---probably both.

Again, may dogs eat this murderous freak's bones.

Egyptian State Dept. Funded Agitator Advising OWS

2011-10-20T04:45:00.002-04:00

A Dude named Death Ray found this in a blog called "Fellowship of Minds" on Wordpress put there by "Eowyn:"

As a forethought, I don't think Glenn Beck & Sean Hannity & Rush Limbaugh or Darrell Issa really support OWS and happily, there is no US Senator from FL named Alan Grayson, because that insult to the human race was sent packing from Congress after lying, cheating, stealing and doing other misdeeds typical of Demonrat politicians. A real sewer rat, but he's rich enough to run again for office.

Susan Sarandon, a grad of Catholic University, just called Pope Benedict XVI a "Nazi." Just saw the terrific movie The Exorcism of Emily Rose on AMC yesterday and Susan reminded me of Belial or perhaps Lucifer's nasty little sister, two of the demons claiming to inhabit poor Emily Rose. Susan S lives in her own private hell.

Deepak Chopra, master of the nuances of foreign policy, blames the USA for the Pakistani ISI-sponsored terrorist attacks on Mumbai last year.

Roseanne Barr is actually trying to duplicate the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, at least career-wise, with her insane inane observations. Rosie O'Donnell remains comatose, happily for the viewing public.

It should be noted that empty-headed bimbo Diane Sawyer, who got her start as Ron Ziegler's go-fer girl in the Nixon White House, noted that OWS demonstrations are taking place "in over a thousand countries." Eight hundred of these countries still have not become members of the United Nations.

I thought you guys might find this information interesting:
Celebrities who’ve spoken out in support of Occupy Wall Street:
Yoko Ono: $500 million
Russell Simmons: $325 million
Rosie O’Donnell: $100 million
Roseanne Barr: $80 million
Deepak Chopra: $80 million
Kanye West: $70 million
Alec Baldwin: $65 million
Susan Sarandon: $50 million
Tim Robbins: $50 million
Michael Moore: $50 million
Danny Glover: $15 million
Talib Kweli: $14 million
Mark Ruffalo: $10 million
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass): $188.37 million
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Ca): $160.05 million
Rep. Jane Harman (D-Ca): $152.62 million
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va): $81.50 million
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas): $73.75 million
Sen. Mark Warner (D- W.Va): $70.19 million
Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo): $56.49 million
Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla): 55.47 million
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ): $49.70 million
Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Ca): $46.07 million
Sen. Alan Grayson (D-Fla): $31.41 million
Rep. Harry Teague (D-NM): $25.52 million
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca): $21.74 million (supports OWS)
Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NY): $19.90 million
Sen. James Riche (R-Idaho) : $19.69 million
Rep. Gary Miller (R-Ca): $19.37 million
Rep. Kenny Marchant (R-Tx): $18.41 million
Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn): $18.21 million
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo): $15.73 million
Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY): $14.90 million
Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine): $12.52 million
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn): $12.12 million
Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont): $10.90 million
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz): $10.52 million
Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa): $10.45 million
The Media:
Rachael Maddow: $12.5 million
Matt Drudge: $15 million
Brian Williams: $30 million (networth); $13 million (annual salary)
Keith Olbermann: $35 million (networth); $10 million (annual salary)
Sean Hannity: $35 million
Diane Sawyer: $40 million (networth); $12 million (annual salary)
Katie Couric: $55 million (networth); $15 million (annual salary)
Jon Stewart: $80 million (networth); $15 million (annual salary)
Glenn Beck: $85 million
Anderson Cooper: $100 million (networth); $11 million (annual salary)
Barbara Walters: $150 million
Rush Limbaugh: $300 million (networth); $40 million (annual salary).
Oprah Winfrey: $2.7 Billion
Non-elected political figures:
Louis Farrakhan (leader of Nation of Islam): $3 million
Ralph Nader: $4.2 million
Chelsea Clinton: $5 million
Al Sharpton: $5 million
Joy Behar: $8 million
Ann Coulter: $8.5 million
Rev. Jesse Jackson: $10 million (supports OWS)
Henry Kissinger: $10 million
Eric Holder (U.S. attorney general): $11.5 million
Sarah Palin: $12 million (networth); $1 million (annual salary)
Hillary Clinton: $21.5 million
Arianna Huffington: $35 million (Forbes calls her the 2nd most influential liberal in the media)
John Edwards: $55.5 million
Al Gore: $100 million (supports OWS)
Mitt Romney: $250 million
Here are the networths of some of the Super-Rich, the Top 0.01% (from Forbes’ richest 400 in America list):
Steve Jobs: $8.3 Billion
Carl Icahn (leveraged buyouts): $12 Billion
Sergey Brin (Google): $15.9 Billion
Charles Koch (manufacturing, energy): $19 Billion
Michael Bloomberg (NY mayor): $20 Billion
George Soros: $22 Billion
Jim Walton (of Wal-Mart): $23.4 Billion
Lawrence Ellison (of Oracle): $27 Billion
Warren Buffet: $50 Billion
Bill Gates (Microsoft): $57 Billion
Raging socialist and President-for-life of Venezuela Hugo Chavez has an estimated networth of $1 Billion (!) — the same as Prince Albert II of Monaco. Another raging socialist, Fidel Castro of Cuba, has an estimated networth of $900 million.
Credit: ~Eowyn — fellowshipofminds.wordpress

I don't think Jobs supports OWS from his newly-acquired status and Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin & Ann Coulter are also doubtful. But it is hilarious that so many stupid rich people are essentially calling for their own financial downfall.

My Two Cents Worth on the Vegas GOP debate

2011-10-19T18:31:00.001-04:00

I think that the biggest "tell" that Romney let slip was when he answered Perry's rather rude question was:

"I'm running for office!" I can't be seen hiring illegals to do my yard work!!

A tiny glimpse beneath the polished and otherwise-impressive fellow who up to then I considered the best dude for pounding Obama into the ground.

I'm sure the Democrats will pick up on that un-Freudian slip as well. Appearances are what count. After all, that's what got the numb-nut now ruining the country elected POTUS in 2008.

I wasn't impressed at all with Cain's stumbling and bumbling explanations of how he "mis-spoke." But if Art Laffer and Paul Ryan are in favor of 9-9-9, I'm giving it a closer look.

Perry led with his jaw, ancient fossil Newt did well with the two "b's," bicker & broke, & Michelle still isn't that bad on the eyeballs, plus she was a tax attorney for a while and she sure out shown Sarah Palin who demonstrated mediocrity in the Fox after-debate analysis.

Santorum is too sententious and Newt is impressive, but lacks judgment, all brain & little ethics. Huntsman is out of the race, thank God, so we don't have to listen to RINO yammer, which Romney will supply in plentiful supply.

Obama Says "America in Decline? Never"

2011-10-18T01:52:00.004-04:00

After Martin Wolf Gideon Rachmann is the Financial Times most perspicacious writer for the Financial Times [Amity Schlaes was, but now works for the Wall Street Journal as its best financial reporter.] The NYT's Joe Nocera is a minor leaguer in the international finance journalism world, and submissive to his dominator, Big Brainless Boss Pinch Sulzberger. Krugman is a Little League wannabe.

Here's Gideon from a sane perspective, which the illiterate in this WH & the dunce in the Oval Office are too simple to comprehend:

Recently I met a retired British diplomat who claimed with some pride that he was the man who had invented the phrase, “the management of decline”, to describe the central task of British foreign policy after 1945. “I got criticised,” he said, “but I think it was an accurate description of our task and I think we did it pretty well.”
No modern American diplomat – let alone politician – could ever risk making a similar statement. That is a shame. If America were able openly to acknowledge that its global power is in decline, it would be much easier to have a rational debate about what to do about it. Denial is not a strategy.

The witless second-rater in the WH has surrounded himself with third-rate "yes-men" whose one job is to keep this Little Leaguer playing in the Major Leagues. Contrary to his delusional remarks from time to time, he "hasn't got game" and a whole new Peter Principle book should be written to describe the writings and squirmings of this serial finger-pointer.

President Barack Obama has said that his goal is to ensure that America remains number one. Even so, he has been excoriated by his opponents for “declinism”. Charles Krauthammer, a conservative columnist, has accused the president of embracing American weakness: “Decline is not a condition,” he declared. “Decline is a choice.” The stern rejection of “declinism” is not confined to the rabid right. Joseph Nye, a Harvard professor and doyen of US foreign policy analysts, regards talk of American decline as an intellectual fad – comparable to earlier paranoia about the US being overtaken by Japan. Thomas Friedman, a New York Times columnist, has just published a book that is subtitled, “What went wrong with America – and how it can come back”.
What is not permissible, in mainstream debate, is to suggest that there may be no “coming back” – and that the decline of American power is neither a fad nor a choice but a fact.
Admittedly, America’s relative decline is likely to be much less abrupt than the falling-off experienced by Britain after 1945. The US is still the world’s largest economy and is easily its pre-eminent military and diplomatic power. However, the moment at which China becomes the world’s largest economy is coming into view – the end of the decade seems a likely passing point. Of course, it is true that China has its own grave political and economic problems. Yet the fact that there are roughly four times as many Chinese as Americans means that – even allowing for a sharp slowdown in Chinese growth – at some point, China will become “number one”.
Even after the US has ceded its economic dominance, America’s military, diplomatic, cultural and technological prowess will ensure that the US remains the world’s dominant political power – for a while. But although economic and political power are not the same thing, they are surely closely related. As China and other powers rise economically, they will inevitably constrain America’s ability to get its way in the world.
That is why America needs to have a rational debate about what “relative decline” means – and why the British experience, although very different, may still hold some valuable lessons.
What the UK discovered after 1945 is that a decline in national power is perfectly compatible with an improvement in living standards for ordinary people, and with the maintenance of national security. Decline need not mean the end of peace and prosperity. But it does mean making choices and forging alliances. In an era of massive budget deficits, and rising Chinese power, the US will have to think harder about its priorities. Last week, Hillary Clinton insisted that America will remain a major power in Asia – with all the military expenditure that this implies. Very well. But what does that mean for spending at home? Few politicians are prepared to have that discussion. Instead, particularly among Republicans, they fall back on feel-good slogans about American “greatness”.
Those who refuse to entertain any discussion of decline actually risk accelerating the process. A realistic acknowledgement that America’s position in the world is under threat should be a spur to determined action on everything from educational reform to the budget deficit. The endless politicking in Washington reflects a certain complacency – a belief that America’s position as number one is so impregnable that it can afford self-indulgent episodes such as the summer’s near-debt default.
The failure to have a proper discussion of relative decline also risks leaving American public opinion unprepared for a new era. As a result, the public reaction to setbacks at home and abroad is less likely to be calm and determined and more likely to be angry and irrational – feeding what the historian Richard Hofstadter famously called “the paranoid style in American politics”.
For the fact is that management of decline is as much to do with psychology, as to do with politics and economics. In 1945, the British task was made much easier by the afterglow of victory in the second world war. Britain’s adjustment was also helped by the fact that the new global hegemon was the US – a country tied to Britain by language, blood and shared political ideas. It will be tougher for America to cede power to China – although the transition will also be much less stark than the one faced by Britain.
These days the British have learnt almost to revel in failure. They buy volumes with titles like the “Book of Heroic Failures” in large numbers. It is quite common for the supporters of a losing English soccer team to chant, “We’re shit and we know we are.” This is not a habit I can see catching on in the US. When it comes to managing decline, self-abasement is optional.

To describe Charles Krauthammer as a member of "the rabid right" negates a lot of Rachmann's credibility, as does his ritual bow to Richard Hofstadter. However, some of his points are well-taken, BUT he does neglect to mention that the paranoia about Japan in the '80s and its subsequent collapse might possibly be mirrored in the "teens" by factors in China that an adoring journalistic fetishist mafia of the socialist sort has yet to discern.

Bill Daley Jr. sings an Irish Lullaby for the Deaf!

2011-10-17T22:58:00.004-04:00

I lived in Chicago for a decade
and got to know a lot of influential people in the Windy City through my contacts connected to my job at Amoco as Political Risk and Economics Advisor to the Chairman and CEO Larry Fuller. At the time, we at Amoco were trying to set up a series of gas stations in Mexico, which was difficult to do because the ruling PRI Party was a socialist/populist regime so nationalist in its petroleum policy that there were ZERO US-owned & operated facilities in the gigantic corruption-ridden political warehouse for PRI family and friends that was [and still is] PEMEX.

I was in charge of trying somehow to get the NAFTA negotiations out of the doldrums that they had fallen into and in 1993 came up with the idea of Amoco's co-sponsoring a conference on NAFTA in DC with CSIS, where I had previously worked for about a year as a fellow. CSIS agreed, but said that Amoco had to provide the money to put on the conference. I personally worked up a proposal and since Larry and his Vice=Chairman Pat Early liked the idea, wrangled a couple of hundred thousand dollars to fund CSIS's conference-facilitation scheme.

I asked personal friend Bill Richardson, for whom I had sponsored a fund-raiser in my home in the late '80s, and head Democrat on the Energy Committee, if he would be a headliner and he said not only that, he'd try to get his friend Senator Bill Bradley, a pro-NAFTA advocate, to be the co-star along with a number of oilmen and economists.

The conference, due to timing and luck, not only went forward, but was a rousing success which was noticed in Mexico City by the Presidente, and downstream negotiations began to move forward rapidly, just as the NAFTA negotiations, stuck because of the opposition of left-wing Democrats driven by big union money, were tossed out in the 1994 elections and suddenly, NAFTA sailed through soon afterward with Republicans in favor of Free Trade now a majority in both houses.

Soon afterward, Bill Daley, who was Sec'y of Commerce under Bill Clinton during the NAFTA negotiations, left his job and returned to Chicago to a seven-figure job with a very influential law firm. A senior partner in the firm and I were friends and he kindly asked if I ever wanted a one-on-one meeting with Daley, he would see if he could set it up. Amazingly, Bill Daley, after checking me out, agreed and he, myself, and my friend had a friendly one-hour conversation in their plush facilities in the Loop. Over coffee and tea and crumpets, we covered the landscape of oil and politics and US trade policy, etc.

I proudly narrated my role in initiating the CSIS conference on NAFTA, and how coincidentally or not, it had seemingly been so successful that it'd seemed to help get the Congress and the Mexican government both out of their respective stuck-in-the-mud positions on NAFTA and moved the process on the Hill forward, even though it was a small event in the larger picture.

To my surprise, suddenly Daley became irritated and brusquely told me that he'd always thought NAFTA and other free trade agreements were "a bad idea" and, though following the Democrat Party line laid down by Billy Jeff Clinton, had been opposed to it from the start and was still skeptical that it would ever work. Now that he was free to speak about his real opinion on the issue, he didn't mince words on how NAFTA and free trade agreements in general were not good for the American economy.

Let's flash forward more than a decade and a half later, and listen to the first question the NYT's highly-respected Bill Harwood asked in a one-on-one interview published in the NYT:
Q. This is a sour time in Washington, but you got the trade deals done. Tell the average struggling business owner, or person looking for a job, how’s this going to affect their life?

A. Well, in addition to the three trade deals for Korea, Panama and Colombia we got trade adjustment assistance, which really is going to people who are negatively affected by trade deals. And there are negatives to them. But over all, you’re creating jobs in the U.S. because of lowering barriers in foreign countries, especially in Korea. The other thing it does, John, is it sends the message to the rest of the world that in these economic times the U.S. will continue to be aggressive about doing trade deals. Our economy is very open to the world.
The rest of the interview is equally interesting, but this gives one a great optic on how a second-rate POTUS like Obama tends to surround himself with third-rate yes-men like Axelrod, Plouffe, and yes, Bill Daley, who is now his White House Chief of Staff.

Politics not only makes strange bedfellows, but it has a tendency to create total hypocrites. In Chicago, of course, this goes back to Machine Politics which have strangled the city's political development for the last century and a half [to be fair, even the GOP participated with Big Bill Hayward's machine in the teens and the twenties].

Like a modern-day Al Jolson, this rotten apple will sing any song required if the Dude in the Big House tells him to.

Like his much-lamented [!?!] daddy, former mayor William The First, Billy-boy's Irish songbook are full of all sorts of tunes that are generated, in this case, in Kenya and Indonesia. This apple didn't fall far from its tree.

To a native of Wisconsin and born in Milwaukee, which was run for decades by Mayor Zeidler, a socialist, and who re-elected Victor Berger, a socialist, even though he was in jail in 1918 during his re-election, there is no comparison. Wisconsin's politics may be skewed and occasionally zany, but they are not the sink of corruption and moral sewage which prevails in "The City of Big Shoulders." The big shoulders are necessary to carry the weight of all the political money siphoned off to the Democrat machine and its crony capitalists.

In south Florida, the politics aren't pretty, but nowhere matches Chicago, New York, Boston and LA for pure putrid politics.*

*Yes, I left out New Orleans, but NO doesn't qualify in the size of the peculations and brazen thievery that prevails in the four capitals of crony capitalism named above. In Milwaukee, socialism wasn't pretty, but it was clean and didn't rob honest taxpayers.

Obama's Houseboy Billy-boy Daley singing some blackface BS for "His Massa"!

2011-10-17T18:07:00.003-04:00

I lived in Chicago for a decade
and got to know a lot of influential people in the Windy City through my contacts connected to my job at Amoco as Political Risk and Economics Advisor to the Chairman and CEO Larry Fuller. At the time, we at Amoco were trying to set up a series of gas stations in Mexico, which was difficult to do because the ruling PRI Party was a socialist/populist regime so nationalist in its petroleum policy that there were ZERO US-owned & operated facilities in the gigantic corruption-ridden political warehouse for PRI family and friends that was [and still is] PEMEX.

I was in charge of trying somehow to get the NAFTA negotiations out of the doldrums that they had fallen into and in 1993 came up with the idea of Amoco's co-sponsoring a conference on NAFTA in DC with CSIS, where I had previously worked for about a year as a fellow. CSIS agreed, but said that Amoco had to provide the money to put on the conference. I personally worked up a proposal and since Larry and his Vice=Chairman Pat Early liked the idea, wrangled a couple of hundred thousand dollars to fund CSIS's conference-facilitation scheme.

I asked personal friend Bill Richardson, for whom I had sponsored a fund-raiser in my home in the late '80s, and head Democrat on the Energy Committee, if he would be a headliner and he said not only that, he'd try to get his friend Senator Bill Bradley, a pro-NAFTA advocate, to be the co-star along with a number of oilmen and economists.

The conference, due to timing and luck, not only went forward, but was a rousing success which was noticed in Mexico City by the Presidente, and downstream negotiations began to move forward rapidly, just as the NAFTA negotiations, stuck because of the opposition of left-wing Democrats driven by big union money, were tossed out in the 1994 elections and suddenly, NAFTA sailed through soon afterward with Republicans in favor of Free Trade now a majority in both houses.

Soon afterward, Bill Daley, who was Sec'y of Commerce under Bill Clinton during the NAFTA negotiations, left his job and returned to Chicago to a seven-figure job with a very influential law firm. A senior partner in the firm and I were friends and he kindly asked if I ever wanted a one-on-one meeting with Daley, he would see if he could set it up. Amazingly, Bill Daley, after checking me out, agreed and he, myself, and my friend had a friendly one-hour conversation in their plush facilities in the Loop. Over coffee and tea and crumpets, we covered the landscape of oil and politics and US trade policy, etc.

I proudly narrated my role in initiating the CSIS conference on NAFTA, and how coincidentally or not, it had seemingly been so successful that it'd seemed to help get the Congress and the Mexican government both out of their respective stuck-in-the-mud positions on NAFTA and moved the process on the Hill forward, even though it was a small event in the larger picture.

To my surprise, suddenly Daley became irritated and brusquely told me that he'd always thought NAFTA and other free trade agreements were "a bad idea" and, though following the Democrat Party line laid down by Billy Jeff Clinton, had been opposed to it from the start and was still skeptical that it would ever work. Now that he was free to speak about his real opinion on the issue, he didn't mince words on how NAFTA and free trade agreements in general were not good for the American economy.

Let's flash forward more than a decade and a half later, and listen to the first question the NYT's highly-respected Bill Harwood asked in a one-on-one interview published in the NYT:
Q. This is a sour time in Washington, but you got the trade deals done. Tell the average struggling business owner, or person looking for a job, how’s this going to affect their life?

A. Well, in addition to the three trade deals for Korea, Panama and Colombia we got trade adjustment assistance, which really is going to people who are negatively affected by trade deals. And there are negatives to them. But over all, you’re creating jobs in the U.S. because of lowering barriers in foreign countries, especially in Korea. The other thing it does, John, is it sends the message to the rest of the world that in these economic times the U.S. will continue to be aggressive about doing trade deals. Our economy is very open to the world.
The rest of the interview is equally interesting, but this gives one a great optic on how a second-rate POTUS like Obama tends to surround himself with third-rate yes-men like Axelrod, Plouffe, and yes, Bill Daley, who is now his White House Chief of Staff.

Politics not only makes strange bedfellows, but it has a tendency to create total hypocrites. In Chicago, of course, this goes back to Machine Politics which have strangled the city's political development for the last century and a half [to be fair, even the GOP participated with Big Bill Hayward's machine in the teens and the twenties].

To a native of Wisconsin and born in Milwaukee, which was run for decades by Mayor Zeidler, a socialist, and who re-elected Victor Berger, a socialist, even though he was in jail in 1918 during his re-election, there is no comparison. Wisconsin's politics may be skewed and occasionally zany, but they are not the sink of corruption and moral sewage which prevails in "The City of Big Shoulders." The big shoulders are necessary to carry the weight of all the political money siphoned off to the Democrat machine and its crony capitalists.

In south Florida, the politics aren't pretty, but nowhere matches Chicago, New York, Boston and LA for pure putrid politics.*

*Yes, I left out New Orleans, but NO doesn't qualify in the size of the peculations and brazen thievery that prevails in the four capitals of crony capitalism named above. In Milwaukee, socialism wasn't pretty, but it was clean and didn't rob honest taxpayers.

The anti-Amity Schlaes Fine Whine of "Declinism"

2011-10-17T17:03:00.005-04:00

Peter Baker wrote a fine book about Putin's new version of Stalinist totalitarianism in 2005 and his wife Susan Glasser helped him co-write it. But she echoes Richard Holbrooke, whom I lunched with [twice] in Lyon, France soon after he founded Foreign Policy, a great mag in the beginning which has declined to become another DNC sounding board. Glasser is now Editor-in-Chief of the Zhdanov/Goebbels type mediocre tripe FP produces nowadays. Here's her latest whine about the Tea Party:

The Amerislump is upon us.

Conservative agitator Pat Buchanan’s new book says America might not survive until 2025; it’s called “The Suicide of a Superpower.” Even less alarmist observers are suddenly sounding a lot like Buchanan, as economists now predict that China may surpass the United States as the world’s largest economy a lot sooner than we thought, and important conferences are convened to deal with what Fareed Zakaria memorably dubbed “the post-American world.”

Over at Foreign Policy, my colleague Joshua Keating (coiner of the “Amerislump” phrase) has taken to tracking all the gloom-and-doom punditry under the heading “Decline Watch” on our website—and not a day goes by without a classic example, from the poverty-stricken new muppet on Sesame Street who doesn’t have enough to eat, to the supposed cocaine slump on Wall Street and the new government initiative to attract Chinese shoppers here — so they can buy Made in China goods, but at the cheap prices caused by our undervalued dollar.

The zeitgeist about America is so bleak that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even begins her speeches these days being forced to remind audiences that the U.S. economy is still the world’s largest and its workers by far the most productive. Clinton, no declinist, invariably does her best to convince us that America is not retreating from the world at a time of national angst. Or at least that it should not.

“Beyond our borders,” she wrote in a recent piece for Foreign Policy that argued that the United States should make a strategic pivot away from the wars of the Middle East and toward the economic opportunities of Asia, many now question “America’s intentions — our willingness to remain engaged and to lead. In Asia, they ask whether we are really there to stay, whether we are likely to be distracted again by events elsewhere, whether we can make — and keep credible economic and strategic commitments, and whether we can back those commitments with action.”

Clinton’s answer is a resounding yes, but the questions themselves are revealing — even extraordinary — coming from a sitting Secretary of State, and the context is pretty clear: These are angst-ridden times to be an unabashed advocate of America’s role in the world, when everyone from Tea Partiers at home to financial markets abroad wonders about the staying power of this humbled superpower.

Sixteen years ago, when another sitting Secretary of State wrote for Foreign Policy, the world looked like a starkly different place to a top American official — a post-Cold War mix of opportunities and threats, bound together not so much by anything except the promise of American leadership. Indeed, said Warren Christopher, “the simple fact is that if we do not lead, no one else will.” It was an age, and one that now seems quaintly outdated, of America the indispensable nation.

If Pat Buchanan is an "agitator," then Glasser is an agitprop specialist, let's call her an "agitpreppie," whose adherence to the Axelrod/Plouffe party line is finely-tuned to keep the restless Volvo-and-brie crowd from escaping the Demonrat plantation.

Holbrooke was a unique combination of lover/fighter/asshole who did have the gumption to get things done, like the American Institute in Berlin of which he should be proud to be the founding godfather. But FP has simply become another dishonest knock-off of Pravda for the pretentious Chardonnay-loving lefties of the Upper West Side.

I knew Warren Christopher personally as an FSO back in the day, and he was always a dependably uninspiring drudge whose legacy led to Madeleine Albright, whom I worked for in the Mondale campaign in 1984 and who is the true author of the phrase that the USA is the "indispensable nation."

It still is indispensable, but is being led by another uninspiring mediocrity who resembles Les Gelb's famous statement about Holbrooke that, "rumors that Dick Holbrooke is half-Jewish are only half-true." Obama is only half-black, but is descended from SLAVEOWNERS and SLAVERS* on both sides of his weird pedigree. He wants to keep the rest of the American blacks on the plantation.

*Barry Soetero's father is a member of the Luo tribe in Kenya who served as middlemen in capturing other black Africans for the slave market in Zanzibar who would be sold to the Arabs and sent to work in the salt mines of Mesopotamia or the harems [after painful castration in which one of ten survived because sand was used as the antioxidant in the grisly procedure] of Cairo and Istanbul. His mother is descended from slaveholders who moved to "Bleeding Kansas" in the 1850s after the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1850 made Kansas a state which would vote on whether or not to remain slave or free. Many famous western outlaws, including Jesse James and the Clinton Gang were also slaveholder advocates from Kansas who "went rogue" after their cause [defended by the Democratic Party and its racist oligarchy and supported by many Democrats in the North] was defeated in the Civil War. Somehow, the Demonrats managed, with help from victims of academicide like Krugboy & his ilk, to con the semi-literate portion of the citizenry that the GOP was responsible for the Confederacy, Connect the dots....

The anti-Amity Schlaes Fine Whine of "Declinism"

2011-10-17T17:03:00.002-04:00

The Amerislump is upon us.

Conservative agitator Pat Buchanan’s new book says America might not survive until 2025; it’s called “The Suicide of a Superpower.” Even less alarmist observers are suddenly sounding a lot like Buchanan, as economists now predict that China may surpass the United States as the world’s largest economy a lot sooner than we thought, and important conferences are convened to deal with what Fareed Zakaria memorably dubbed “the post-American world.”

Over at Foreign Policy, my colleague Joshua Keating (coiner of the “Amerislump” phrase) has taken to tracking all the gloom-and-doom punditry under the heading “Decline Watch” on our website—and not a day goes by without a classic example, from the poverty-stricken new muppet on Sesame Street who doesn’t have enough to eat, to the supposed cocaine slump on Wall Street and the new government initiative to attract Chinese shoppers here — so they can buy Made in China goods, but at the cheap prices caused by our undervalued dollar.

The zeitgeist about America is so bleak that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even begins her speeches these days being forced to remind audiences that the U.S. economy is still the world’s largest and its workers by far the most productive. Clinton, no declinist, invariably does her best to convince us that America is not retreating from the world at a time of national angst. Or at least that it should not.

“Beyond our borders,” she wrote in a recent piece for Foreign Policy that argued that the United States should make a strategic pivot away from the wars of the Middle East and toward the economic opportunities of Asia, many now question “America’s intentions — our willingness to remain engaged and to lead. In Asia, they ask whether we are really there to stay, whether we are likely to be distracted again by events elsewhere, whether we can make — and keep credible economic and strategic commitments, and whether we can back those commitments with action.”

Clinton’s answer is a resounding yes, but the questions themselves are revealing — even extraordinary — coming from a sitting Secretary of State, and the context is pretty clear: These are angst-ridden times to be an unabashed advocate of America’s role in the world, when everyone from Tea Partiers at home to financial markets abroad wonders about the staying power of this humbled superpower.

Sixteen years ago, when another sitting Secretary of State wrote for Foreign Policy, the world looked like a starkly different place to a top American official — a post-Cold War mix of opportunities and threats, bound together not so much by anything except the promise of American leadership. Indeed, said Warren Christopher, “the simple fact is that if we do not lead, no one else will.” It was an age, and one that now seems quaintly outdated, of America the indispensable nation.

If Pat Buchanan is an "agitator," then Glasser is an agitprop specialist, let's call her an "agitpreppie," whose adherence to the Axelrod/Plouffe party line is finely-tuned to keep the restless Volvo-and-brie crowd from escaping the Demonrat plantation.

Holbrooke was a unique combination of lover/fighter/asshole who did have the gumption to get things done, like the American Institute in Berlin of which he should be proud to be the founding godfather. But FP has simply become another dishonest knock-off of Pravda for the pretentious Chardonnay-loving lefties of the Upper West Side.

I knew Warren Christopher personally as an FSO back in the day, and he was always a dependably uninspiring drudge whose legacy led to Madeleine Albright, whom I worked for in the Mondale campaign in 1984 and who is the true author of the phrase that the USA is the "indispensable nation."

It still is indispensable, but is being led by another uninspiring mediocrity who resembles Les Gelb's famous statement about Holbrooke that, "rumors that Dick Holbrooke is half-Jewish are only half-true." Obama is only half-black, but is descended from SLAVEOWNERS and SLAVERS* on both sides of his weird pedigree. He wants to keep the rest of the American blacks on the plantation.

*Barry Soetero's father is a member of the Luo tribe in Kenya who served as middlemen in capturing other black Africans for the slave market in Zanzibar who would be sold to the Arabs and sent to work in the salt mines of Mesopotamia or the harems [after painful castration in which one of ten survived because sand was used as the antioxidant in the grisly procedure] of Cairo and Istanbul. His mother is descended from slaveholders who moved to "B leading Kansas" in the 1850s after the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1850 made Kansas a state which would vote on whether or not to remain slave or free. Many famous western outlaws, including Jesse James and the Clinton Gang were also slaveholder advocates who "went rogue" after their cause was defeated in the Civil War. Connect the dots....

Amity Schlaes on why cutting taxes enriches us all.

2011-10-17T16:34:00.002-04:00

Amity Schlaes and Martin Wolf were my favorite economic analysts when I had the Financial Times delivered to my door. I read her book on the phony claims of the "New Deal" engineered by FDR & his army of orcs and became convinced that what jump-started the US economy wasn't government spending per se, but the unique circumstances of World War II on energizing the creative juices of the American singular ability to turn dreams into reality, even if they result in the atomic bomb.

Here Amity explains how Steve Jobs' success was the result of an obscure Wisconsin congressman named Steiger [as a Wisconsin native, I am proud to point this out] and several other legislative and regulatory reforms:

Sometimes two separate news events turn out to be related. That's the case with the Wall Street protesters and the extraordinary mourning at the death of Steve Jobs.

Some protesters have praised Jobs as the billionaire who was different—unlike the callous Wall Streeters, he was "beneficial to society." There's a second connection. More than anything else, the Wall Street protesters feel powerless, mere individuals against great banks. Maybe the mourning over the Apple founder is so intense precisely because Jobs gave individuals power. It's hard to think of a gift more empowering than your own personal computer.

Also fueling the grief is a more general suspicion that another Jobs won't come along soon. He was a creature of his times, the late 1970s, the 1980s and 1990s. There wasn't merely Jobs; there was also that economy in which he and other venture-capital recipients operated. Americans fear that the opportunities Jobs enjoyed won't come again.

It's worthwhile therefore to go back and look at what happened in those years, and then to look at how policy changes may have affected innovating firms that received venture capital.

The era didn't start well. The mid-1970s were a dead period. Then suddenly, from 1977 to 1978, new private capital devoted to venture capital increased by 15 times, to $570 million in 1978 from $39 million the year before.

In 1977, public underwritings of firms with a net worth of less than $5 million amounted to a meager $75 million. By 1980 that figure was $822 million, as Michael K. Evans, founder of Chase Econometrics, points out. The venture-capital boom continued down the decades, serving computing, technology, biotech and many other areas.

Jimmy Carter's disastrous four-year term did have one upside---deregulation. And this is the only time you'll see me say anything positive about the bumbler from Plains.

Over time, what we might call the Jobs Economy led to a jobs economy. In the past quarter-century, Apple and innovative companies like it yielded employment for a whole region, Silicon Valley; an improvement in America's standard of living with the creation of personal computing; and productivity gains throughout the economy.

But what caused this boom? Three policy changes. The first was a tax cut for which this newspaper campaigned.

In the late 1960s, Congress had raised the tax rate on capital gains dramatically, to 49%. The received wisdom behind the increase was that mainly wealthy people realized capital gains, and that, a la Warren Buffett, the wealthy ought to pay a larger share of social programs for lower earners. But venture capital dried up so much that by 1977-78 even the Carter administration nursed doubts about high rates.

Voices advocating a rate cut soon grew louder. The idea found a champion in 40-year-old Rep. William Steiger, whom Time magazine profiled as "a baby-faced Wisconsin Republican who has the gung-ho style of a JayCee president." Time worriedly reminded readers that in Steiger's capital gains tax-cut plan "the benefits go to people with incomes of $100,000 or more"—back then, the rich.

Steiger nonetheless found dozens of co-sponsors. He succeeded in getting Congress to pass the Steiger Amendment, which halved the capital gains rate, to an effective 25%.

Many wealthy people did indeed make more money as a result, including some of those less-lovable billionaires on Wall Street. But they then invested in companies like Apple. The revenues from the rich-man's rate cut were stronger than expected, so the federal government got more money to spend—more money than expected for those social programs.

A second policy change came in pension law. In 1974, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, known as Erisa, codified the common law prudent-man principle by warning pension investors that they might be neglecting their fiduciary responsibilities if they invested in risky projects like Apple. The pension funds and portfolio investors duly stayed away. That changed when the definitions were relaxed later in the 1970s, as Josh Lerner and Paul Alan Gompers have noted in "The Money of Invention." Pension funds could again tell themselves and their clients that they were acting responsibly when they invested in start-ups. The funds began to put more cash into venture capital.

A third factor, and one that ensured the boom would continue, was a law passed in 1980. Sponsored by Sens. Birch Bayh of Indiana and Bob Dole of Kansas, the measure clarified murky intellectual property rights so that universities and professors, especially, knew they owned their own ideas and could sell them. That knowledge gave professors and lab teams an enormous incentive to put to commercial use plans and ideas for inventions that they had long ago shelved in their minds and offices.

The obscure pair of wonks who were hired for summer jobs as teenagers by the fledgling Hewlett/Packard were now set to fly on their own. The two Steves, showman Jobs and geek Wozniak, launched their company from the family garage in 1977, I believe, and virtually invented the prototype PC on their own. But showman Gates and his buddy were also tinkering and were suckling at the teat of IBM & snatching concepts like GUIs from smarter dudes like Jobs and some geeks at Xerox. The stage was set and the Super Bowl ad in 1984 with the sledgehammer being thrown into Big Brother's face on the big screen was the beginning of a new era:

To these three advantages one might add a fourth. The advantage of a disadvantage: the poor performance and reduced expectations of the 1970s. New technology (telephones that showed the face of the person you were calling, linked networks of computers) had been around for years, but they languished in those university offices or in museum displays.

The demand for this new technology, frustrated as it was, built and built. It meant that when someone like Jobs finally did deliver a gizmo, his market was a whole impatient generation of would-be gadget handlers, people who were delighted to have new technology and delighted to find new applications for it.

"Personal Computers are Becoming More Useful to Many Investors," wrote Journal editors in wonderment in 1980. It's not inconceivable that similar changes in policy today might yield a similar boom. When it comes to taxes, the 1970s takeaway is that taxes on capital should always be lowered, and dramatically. Cutting a rich man's tax can serve the lowliest citizens.

The second takeaway is that an administration's choices matter when editing, interpreting or enforcing statutes and regulation. The Erisas of today are Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley; subtle clarifications in their rules can affect the overall gross domestic product. A third is that property rights matter; today's Bayh-Dole should be patent reform.

But last of all there's the silver lining to our current cloud. It is that the economic mediocrity of the recent years constitutes someone's advantage. And that someone is young innovators. All this time, demand has once again been building. As soon as the economy feels reliable, people will go out and make the 2015 equivalent of the early PC.

Amity Schlaes should have got the Nobel Prize that the impostor Krugman got just as Obama snatched one for being a good Uncle Tom in the DNC plantation.

"Occupy Wall Street" Protestor Paid $22/hr plus Overtime!

2011-10-11T06:31:00.002-04:00

"The sad-sad Schmuck says his "benefactors" are "getting their money's worth" in the paycheck this sandwich-board for Obamacare and Soros-type Communism picks up daily for slacking with anti-bank and anti-WS signs at a bus stop.

Could it be more of Obunglere's "stimulus" funds funneled through a crooked union gang of thugs? Yesterday, commissar-for-BS Pelosi again accused the Tea Party protesters of "spitting on members of Congress" after this botox-queen paraded across Capitol Hill two years ago carrying an outsized gavel.

Now the lamestream MSM blames the GOP for not passing O'Bozo's jobs bill that he wants "NOW, RIGHT NOW" while stutter step Harry Reid mumbles on about no more filibusters. When the GOP sweeps the Senate in Nov. 2012, this BS machine will have to eat his own product. Obungler can't even get the Demonrat Senate to pass his jobs bill, but the gutless spineless half-breed blames the GOP.

JD Samsom's Fine Whine About Occupying Wall Street

2011-10-09T11:12:00.002-04:00

The NROnline has an excellent article that says what I've been saying in my blogs for a long time, that the entire Californification of the USA, about which read Cong. McClintock here, rests on Nietzsche's concept of Ressentiment which NRO defines thusly:

The great, and probably terminal, flaw of the Left’s various grievance-group “isms” is that they implicitly rely on a world in which trade-offs have been abolished. It isn’t just that Samsom should be free to move to New York and consecrate herself to her “art.” It’s that she should be free to do that while enjoying all the benefits of her choice and suffering none of the consequences. What she wants is not the freedom to choose but the freedom from having to choose.

What sort of worldview makes this fantasy conceivable? Well, if I had to pick just one French term of art popularized by a 19th-century German philologist to describe the Occupy Wall Street set and its attendants, it would be Nietzsche’s Ressentiment. Why does good old English “resentment” not suffice? Why is the extra ‘s’ and fancy French pronunciation required? Well, resentment is about begrudging the success of your betters as a way to avoid reflection on your own failures. The Nietzsche scholar Robert Solomon described resentment as an “impotence self-righteousness” directed at your superiors, and contrasted it with anger (directed at your equals) and contempt (directed at your inferiors). But ressentiment is what happens when you take that impotent self-righteousness and define a whole morality of good and evil in terms of it, build a whole belief system out of it, build an ideology, a political movement — an occupation.

Nietzsche’s work is highly problematic, and has of course been misappropriated and abused for a hundred years, but I think he got this much right on. He was also correct to point out that out that the leaders of men, the successful few — you might even call them the one percent — are too busy acting, doing, and accomplishing to complain about their “emotional crises.” Contrast with the likes of Samsom, who in a stream of consciousness puts all her resentment on paper — writes it all down for the world to see — drawing a line — a squiggly, irrational line, but a line nonetheless — from her insecurity about not being able to make coffee or wait tables or draw a steady paycheck, to the demonization of Wall Street. Seriously, the first paragraph of her piece is all about how ill-equipped and incompetent she is (I didn’t say it, she did!) and the clarion cry at the end is that all this constitutes “Another reason to come together. Another reason to occupy Wall Street. Another reason for change.”

If this is how the other 99 percent think — or rather, don’t — we’re done for.

JD Samsom's moronic rant is on HuffPo, which I rarely like to link to. But surprisingly, The Atlantic Monthly has an interesting piece by a shrink who thinks her age-cohort is ruining the younger generations by abolishing competition in team sports and generally mollycoddling their youngsters never to feel failure or any kind of pain whatsoever.

Occasionally, besides Megan McArdle, The Atlantic has articles that DO make sense. I swiped it from a doctor's office.

Solyndra Mess Smells as Bad as Fast and Furious

2011-10-08T12:45:00.002-04:00

MessNBC notes that a big Obama fund-bundler named Spinner pushed for a big loan despite publicly "recusing" himself because his wife's law firm

represented the company, newly released emails show.
The emails show that Steve Spinner, a former Obama fundraiser who helped monitor a clean energy loan guarantee program, was more actively involved in a loan for Solyndra LLC than administration officials have acknowledged.
Also revealed in the emails: A top Treasury Department official complained that the Energy Department was keeping her agency in the dark about Solyndra's precarious financial situation.
The emails, released by the administration in response to congressional investigators, show that Spinner was actively involved in a planned September 2009 trip by Vice President Joe Biden to Solyndra's Fremont, Calif., headquarters for a groundbreaking ceremony. Biden did not go on the trip but spoke via satellite. Solyndra declared bankruptcy last month after receiving a $528 million federal loan.
In the emails, Spinner, who founded a sports fitness company, repeatedly pushed Energy Department and White House budget officials to ensure that the loan was finalized before Biden's planned trip. The loan closing was announced at the groundbreaking ceremony on Sept. 4, 2009.
"How — hard is this? What is he waiting for?" Spinner wrote in an Aug, 28, 2009 email to a DOE official. "I have the OVP (Office of the Vice President) and WH (the White House) breathing down my neck on this. They are getting itchy to get involved."
Later that day, Spinner asked the same DOE official to "walk over there and force him to give you the answer.'
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The emails refer to a DOE loan guarantee official who was evaluating the Solyndra loan.
A White House official declined to comment when asked if Spinner's conduct was appropriate.
The Obama administration allowed news organizations to read the emails on Friday as it prepared to send them to investigators for the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The panel has been looking into the Solyndra and more broadly at the $38 billion loan guarantee program.
Spinner, who served as an adviser to Energy Secretary Steven Chu from April 2009 to September 2010, pledged in writing not to have "active participation" in any solicitation, due diligence or negotiation related to the Solyndra loan, which has become an embarrassment for the White House and a rallying cry for GOP critics of Obama's clean energy program.
Other political news of note

Spinner's wife, Allison Berry Spinner, is a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, a firm in Palo Alto, Calif., that represented Solyndra on the DOE loan. Federal records show the firm received at least $2.4 million in legal fees related to the loan.
In one email, Spinner asks a DOE official whether the White House budget office has completed its review of the Solyndra loan.
"Any word on OMB? Solyndra's getting nervous," he wrote, four minutes after receiving an email from Solyndra.
Official in charge of energy loans resigns
Energy Department spokesman Damien LaVera said Spinner acted as a liaison for the loan program under the economic stimulus law, but that he played no role in evaluating individual loan applications.
"Because his wife agreed not to participate in or receive any financial compensation from her law firm's work on behalf of any loan program applicant, Mr. Spinner was authorized to oversee and monitor the progress of applications, ensure that the program met its deadlines and milestones, and coordinate possible public announcements," LaVera said in an email Friday.
Spinner "was not allowed to make decisions on the terms or conditions of any particular loan guarantee or decide whether a particular transaction was approved," LaVera said, adding that the arrangement was approved by the Energy Department's ethics officer.
Spinner now is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank closely identified with the Obama administration, where he focuses on energy policy.
A biography on the CAP website says Spinner "helped oversee the more than $100 billion of loan guarantee and direct lending authority for the Title XVII Loan Guarantee Program and the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing loan program."

An administration official, speaking on condition that he not be identified because of the congressional investigation, said Friday that Spinner "clearly was actively involved in facilitating between DOE and OMB," the White House budget office, but said his main focus was the planned Biden trip for the Solyndra groundbreaking.
Administration officials cited an August 2009 email from Aditya Kumar, an aide to former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, now Chicago mayor. Kumar asks Spinner who are Solyndra's major investors and receives a detailed answer.
The White House "doesn't even know the names of the (Solyndra) investors," said the official, refuting oft-repeated claims by some GOP lawmakers that the Solyndra deal was approved to benefit Oklahoma billionaire George Kaiser, a Solyndra investor and Obama fundraiser.
The emails also show that Mary Miller, Treasury's assistant secretary for financial markets, contacted the White House budget director in August with her concerns only two weeks before Solyndra filed for bankruptcy and was raided by the FBI.
When the company ran out of cash, the Energy Department agreed in February to a plan to restructure its debt. In that restructuring, some $75 million in private investment was ranked ahead of the government in the event of bankruptcy. That private fund was backed by a prominent Obama fundraiser.

Fast and Furious resulted in the deaths of two American government agents----wonder if Solyndra and F&F together can destroy this Demonrat RICO conglomerate of anarchists occupying Wall Street, SEIU union thugs and goons, victims of academicide, Hollyweirdos and trial lawyers?

Oops, almost left out the lamestream MSM---the NYT & all its pilot fish like NBC, CBS, ABC & Communist News Network.

Herman Cain Warmly Received At Values Voter Summit, Says Perry-Backer Calling Mormonism 'A Cult' Is Not Appropriate

2011-10-08T12:14:00.001-04:00

The more I see of Herman Cain, the more I like about him. Not an ounce of affirmative action fake elitist tone that Obamarx reeks of. The guy started from nowhere, was a math whiz and ballistics officer who started his own SUCCESSFUL business, was CHAIRMAN of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank and knows more about economics both on the ground and theoretically than the phony mulatto now sitting in the Oval Office. I don't see color, I see quality, and Cain is certainly more genuine than Romney, more rational than Perry and more electable than Bachmann. I think he and Marco Rubio as VP candidate would knock Obungler's socks off in 2012, despite the elitist media/academicide/Hollyweird mafiosi and the union thugs and goons being all for Obungler's privatist socialism and gigantic government by regulations and rules and insane lez-bean queens.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Fast and Furious: The Crimes Continue with the Cover-Up

2011-10-08T10:28:00.002-04:00

Eric Holder has been lying to Congress in the fiasco that saw a decorated US border agent killed with guns allowed to "walk" into Mexico. The POTUS and liar-in-chief says he supports Holder. A US Immigration Officer in Mexico was also killed with an F&F gun. Eleven other crimes in the US have been involved with the F&F arsenal that the ATF "lost track of" in another example of the criminal incompetence of this regime.

Watergate didn't result in the deaths of American agents, as Fast and Furious has. Obama & Holder have blood on their hands. No "Inspector General" will find anything and it will be another whitewash by the RICO thugs that comprise the DNC & SEIU international crime ring. When the fox is inspecting the chicken coop, don't expect to solve your problems.

Words of wisdom from Rush Limbaugh

2011-10-07T02:08:00.001-04:00

Rush Limbaugh contends that President Barack Obama is "setting up riots" through the Occupy Wall Street protests that are spreading across the country.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that the White House is behind this,” he said. “Obama is setting up riots. He is fanning the flames.”

The “anarchists” and “union thugs” who are rallying against corporate greed are Obama’s constituents, Limbaugh said.

“Occupy Wall Street is his base,” he said. “Those are his foot soldiers.”

Calling Obama’s news conference about the American Jobs Act this morning “incompetence on parade,” Limbaugh said the nearly $450 billion spending package has no chance of curing the economic ills.

“Somebody explain to me how spending $450 billion is going to get every bridge repaired, every school repaired, every road repaired,” he said. “This is utter foolishness.”

Obama is “trying to sell the notion that this bill . . . is a magic elixir,” Limbaugh said.

“He’s the one screwing everybody,” he said. “He’s the one happily managing the decline of the United States of America.”

Read more on Newsmax.com: Rush Limbaugh: Obama 'Setting Up Riots' With Occupy Wall Street
Important: Do You Support Pres. Obama's Re-Election? Vote Here Now!

George Soros: Criminally Guilty of Insider Trading

2011-10-07T01:47:00.002-04:00

Soros, the Nazi-loving Hungarian Jew who made a billion dollars shorting the pound lost his appeal of an insider-trading conviction in France in 2002.

The French criminal case hinged on trades that the Hungary-born investor had executed 14 years earlier in the stock of Société Générale that reaped his hedge fund, the Quantum Fund, $2.9m in profits.
Mr Soros was found by the court in 2002 to have had inside knowledge about the intentions of a group of super-wealthy French investors – the “golden granddads” – to bid for the bank.
Although the bid failed, Mr Soros’s fund profited by buying shares before – and selling after – the group’s intentions became public and resulted in a spike in SocGen’s share price.
Mr Soros was fined €2.2m (£1.9m), later reduced to €940,507 on appeal.
At the time, Mr Soros described the guilty verdict as a “gift to my enemies”.
He is now left with one final, unlikely, chance to rid himself of his conviction: an appeal to the grand chamber of the ECHR. Such appeals are only heard on an “exceptional basis”, according to the court’s rules.

This criminal Soros is, of course, one of the prime movers along with the lame stream MSM and POTUS O'Bozo insurrectionary "Occupy Wall Street" anarchy that demonstrates that when you have no policy or intelligence, rousing up the rabble is about the last best hope a criminal administration and its criminal supporters have left to rely on.

Only in America: Homecoming Queen Kicks Winning Field Goal over Arch-Rival after Half-time Crowning

2011-10-04T10:33:00.002-04:00

Brianna Amat made the New York Times in spectacular fashion:

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — In his 18 years at Pinckney Community High School, Jim Darga, the principal, said, the homecoming queen had always been crowned at halftime of the school’s football game. Never before, though, had she had to be summoned from the team’s locker room.

Brianna Amat, the first girl to make the Pinckney varsity football team, said her teammates had “been so accepting of me.”
And that was just the beginning of Brianna Amat’s big night.

If being named homecoming queen is a lifetime memory for a high school student, so, too, is kicking a winning field goal. For Amat, 18, they happened within an hour of each other.

On Friday, with Pinckney leading powerful Michigan rival Grand Blanc, 6-0, at the half, Amat, the first girl to play football for the school’s varsity, was asked to return to the field. When she arrived, she was told that her fellow students had voted her queen. When the tiara was placed on her head, she was wearing not a dress, like the other girls in the homecoming court, but her No. 12 uniform, pads and all.

A short while later, with five minutes to play in the third quarter, Amat was called to the same field to attempt a 31-yard field goal. She split the uprights.

The kick proved decisive as Pinckney held on for a 9-7 victory against a Grand Blanc team that had come into the game ranked seventh in the state in its division. It also earned Amat the nickname the Kicking Queen.

The twin accomplishments were still sinking in Monday, said Amat, a senior who has played soccer since she was 3 but who tried out for the football team only last spring, at her soccer coach’s suggestion.

“It’s just starting to hit me today,” she said in a telephone interview. “The guys were congratulating me, but without them, I wouldn’t even have gotten close” to making the kick.

“It was pretty special,” said Darga, who watched Amat win her crown and the game and called her an “accomplished athlete.”

Before Friday, Darga said, Amat was known primarily as a student with a perfect 4.0 grade average who was involved in student government, serving as treasurer.

Although the high school has had a female player on its junior varsity team, Amat is the first girl to make the main squad in Pinckney, a village of 2,000 17 miles from Ann Arbor. The school, which draws from several rural communities, has 1,440 students.

Amat’s prowess as a defender on the school’s girl’s soccer team led to the invitation to try out as a football kicker. She competed against two male students, including one who wound up as the team’s punter.

“She won the position on her own merit,” Darga said. “She won it outright.”

Amat had no previous football experience before joining the team in summer training. But she spent hours kicking balls in a field to her father, Ronaldo, a window and door salesman, and her brother Brandon, a University of Michigan student.

Amat said her father and mother, Nanci, who works at the high school, approved of her playing.

“They’ve been really supportive of everything I do,” she said.

Amat made her debut during the Pirates’ first game this season, when she was called in to kick an extra point after a touchdown.

“The whole warm-up, I was nervous,” she said.

She said she stayed calm during the kick but that afterward, “my heart was beating in my ears from the adrenaline.”

Amat said she had not needed much adjustment to become Pinckney’s first female varsity football player. She was surprised at how quickly she was made to feel like one of the guys.

“They’ve been so accepting of me, it’s as if I’ve always been their teammate,” she said.

The main drawback has been the separate locker room provided by the school, which keeps her apart from the male players.

“After the games, they’re celebrating in their locker room and I’m by myself in my locker room,” she said.

On Friday night, Amat said she had an extra incentive to make her third-quarter field goal. She had missed an extra-point attempt in the first half, leaving Pinckney ahead by 6-0.

“I put pressure on myself to make it,” Amat said. “I wanted to apologize to the team.”

She added that the miss also distracted from the homecoming ceremony.

“I don’t think I went into homecoming mode,” she said. “I just wanted to get back into the locker room and be with the team.”

At Pinckney, students vote for a homecoming court made up of one male and one female student from the freshman, sophomore and junior classes, and three boys and three girls from the senior class. The king and queen are elected in a schoolwide vote.

In the locker room at halftime, Amat and a male teammate were told they were part of the court, and went out in their gear. (Had she not been playing, Amat said, she would have worn “a nice dress, a long dress, what the other girls had on.”)

She was met by her brother, her kick retriever, who had given up tickets to the Michigan-Minnesota football game the next day so that he could watch her play and, ultimately, to serve as her homecoming escort.

There was no time to relish the victories, said Amat, who went straight home to bed. As student treasurer, she had to rise early Saturday to help with decorations for the homecoming dance. She wore a black and silver dress to the event, which she attended with a group of friends.

Winning kick and coronation behind her, Amat said she was now concentrating on winning acceptance to Western Michigan, where she applied in September.

Amat plans to set sports aside to concentrate on a degree in business advertising. But she said she might reconsider if offered an athletic scholarship.

The attention, from classmates and the news media, has been a surprise to the kicking queen.

“For the longest time, I was the shyest kid ever, and now everybody knows my name,” she said. “It’s a totally different experience.”

Hans Christian Andersen couldn't have scripted it better. Sounds like it's ready for the big screen, but having her brother as her homecoming escort probably ruins the love-interest.

Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski Debate Rick Perry N-Word Controversy (VIDEO)

2011-10-03T14:11:00.001-04:00

I think for once Mika beats Meathead Joe, the RINO phony on the importance of the issues. Invading Mexico is actually major-league crazy compared with some hunting camp. Joe has an obvious animus against Perry, so Mika wins the award for which issue has JOURNALISTIC importance. Joe just loves them gotcha' games, I guess.

I worked with Mika's father at CSIS and like the guy, who's an open-minded guy who's often wrong, but will consider other points of view. I also was at CSIS with Henry the K, who believed he could turn water into wine and then walk on it. All my colleagues who worked closely with both gave Zbig thumbs up and Henry the Italian salute....behind his back.

Sadly, Morning Joe is the best of a bad lot on morning news shows, and the quality of journalism over the last couple of decades on air and in the print press---except for the WSJ which is now the most widely read American daily----continues to decline precipitously. I'd say we're gonna have Euro-style street riots pretty soon---no dialogue going on with Obamarx & his buddies blaming everything but their own improvident "stimulus" spending for our economic bad times.

All the pols are so compromised that Herman Cain, who chaired the KC Fed and started and succeeded on his own in an HONEST [sorry, Mitt] business, is beginning to look like the best of a bad lot.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Garofalo & Company make huge fools of selves

2011-10-03T10:10:00.002-04:00

Herman Cain is now a new indicator that a person is a "racist" if one supports Cain:

Damned if you do. Damned if you don’t. If you reject the policies of President Obama, you’re a racist. If you support the policies of Herman Cain, you’re a racist. What’s a “white” person to do?

As soon as someone plays the race card, you know that they lost the debate. It’s a 5th-grader’s playground trump card to win an argument he just lost in front of his friends. He got stomped, so he yells out, “Your mother wears army boots!” Liberalism can’t stand facts, and they can’t believe that opposition or support of a candidate is based on policy considerations. Sure, there are bigots out there . . . in both parties. Keep in mind that it was the Democrats that supported Jim Crow laws in the South. Following the logic of today’s race baiters, when Democrats began to reject these laws, they were racists.

The white queen of hate, illogic, and stupidity, Janeane Garofalo, said this about Republicans who support Herman Cain for president in 2012.

People like Karl Rove liked to keep the racism very covert. And so Herman Cain provides this great opportunity say you can say ‘Look, this is not a racist, anti-immigrant, anti-female, anti-gay movement. Look we have a black man.

Karl Rove? Once again, it’s “everything is Bush’s fault” syndrome. In case you don’t know, Mr. Cain “is a businessman, a talk show host, a former executive of several multi-billion dollar companies. . . . He has for the last several years been a mainstay at Tea Party rallies all across the country and draws big, enthusiastic crowds among these conservative activists. He’s a powerful speaker and really knows how to wind up an audience. Lately he’s won several straw polls and is ranked no less than the number 3 candidate to take the Republican nomination. He is also black.”

Black comedian D.L. “Doc” Hughley has made similar comments about Cain.

Apparently, Herman Cain’s victory in the GOP Florida straw poll was too much for the liberal-minded Hughley to bear. On September 27, Hughley launched into a stream of demeaning, racially charged tweets about Cain on his Twitter account @RealDLHughley, which his loyal followers responded to in kind. You may remember Hughley’s fleeting CNN talk show was cancelled in 2009 because he said during an interview with former RNC Chairman Michael Steele “the Republican National Convention literally looks like Nazi Germany.”

Typical of liberal-minded, tolerant Democrats, there was a stream of bigoted comments to follow. Cain was compared to the “original Cream of Wheat,” “Stepin Fetchit” and the “butler in Gone with the Wind.” Do you remember when Michael Steele was running for the Senate in Maryland? They pelted him with Oreo cookies to identify him as “black on the outside and white on the inside.” Here’s how the Washington Times reported the story:

Black Democratic leaders in Maryland say that racially tinged attacks against Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele in his bid for the U.S. Senate are fair because he is a conservative Republican.

Such attacks against the first black man to win a statewide election in Maryland include pelting him with Oreo cookies during a campaign appearance, calling him an “Uncle Tom” and depicting him as a black-faced minstrel on a liberal Web log.

Delegate Salima Siler Marriott, a black Baltimore Democrat, said Mr. Steele invites comparisons to a slave who loves his cruel master or a cookie that is black on the outside and white inside because his conservative political philosophy is, in her view, anti-black.

“Because he is a conservative, he is different than most public blacks, and he is different than most people in our community,” she said. “His politics are not in the best interest of the masses of black people.”

So who’s really on the Plantation? Who’s beholden to their “masters”? Those who support the Democrat Party. If a black man attempts to escape and head for freedom, he or she will be dragged back and told to vote for their masters or else. It’s no wonder that Herman Cain said that Blacks “have been brainwashed into not being open-minded, not even considering a conservative point of view,” especially since Democrat policies have kept so many blacks in poverty as well as a lot of poor whites for more than four decades.

And Remember that Eric Holder believes that the "NEW" Black Panthers have a right to carry automatic weapons in full view around voting booths in black precincts. The Demonrats are the real fascist slaveholders and project their own hatred and impotence onto tax-paying Tea Party members, whose ancestors made America the greatest country in the world.

Daniel Henninger on giving Herman Cain a second look

2011-09-29T14:00:00.002-04:00

The WSJ has an interesting article on why Herman Cain should get a better look-see in the GOP primary season. Good article and makes sense.

Crony Capitalism or Privativist Fascism---Which one fits better?

2011-09-29T13:41:00.003-04:00

Nancy Pelosi is going to her grave a wealthy woman, it seems, unless The Weekly Standard is getting its facts wrong:

Despite the growing Solyndra scandal, yesterday the Department of Energy approved $1 billion in new loans to green energy companies -- including a $737 million loan guarantee to a company known as SolarReserve:

SolarReserve LLC, a closely held renewable energy developer, received a $737 million U.S. Energy Department loan guarantee to build a solar-thermal project in Nevada.

The 110-megawatt Crescent Dunes project, near Tonopah, Nevada, will use the sun’s heat to create steam that drives a turbine, the agency said today in a e-mailed statement. SolarReserve is based in Santa Monica, California.

On SolarReserve's website is a list of "investment partners," including the "PCG Clean Energy & Technology Fund (East) LLC." As blogger American Glob quickly discovered, PCG's number two is none other than "Ronald Pelosi, a San Francisco political insider and financial industry polymath who happens to be the brother-in-law of Nancy Pelosi, the Minority Leader of the United States House of Representatives."

But wait... there's more! One of SolarReserve's other investment partners is Argonaut Private Equity:

Steve Mitchell and Argonaut Private Equity might have a chance to recoup some of their losses in the Solyndra debacle now that the Department of Energy has given a $737 million dollar loan guarantee to a company backed by Argonaut that also lists Mitchell among its board of directors.

Mitchell served on the Solyndra LLC Board of Directors. He also serves as Managing Director for Argonaut Private Equity, a company that invested in Solyndra through the LLCs parent company. After Solyndra declared bankruptcy, two Democratic members of the U.S. House asked that Mitchell testify about Solyndra. Though he has not appeared before Congress, he has "been asked to provide documents to Congress" pertaining to Solyndra.

And for good measure, it's also noteworthy that Obama is about to hold a big money fundraiser at the home of Tom Carnahan in St. Louis:

Carnahan, a member of the prominent Missouri Democratic family, has been tapped by the Obama campaign as its chief Missouri fundraiser. He is chairman of the board of Wind Capital Group, a wind energy company that makes it corporate headquarters in St. Louis. He formerly was president and CEO of the company.

Last year, Wind Capital's Lost Creek Farm facility in northwest Missouri received a $107 million tax credit from the Treasury Department, among many such wind operations receiving support from from stimulus funds.

Tom Carnahan is the son of former Missouri governor Mel Carnahan and former U.S. senator Jean Carnahan. He's also the brother of current Missouri secretary of state, Robin Carnahan.

It's increasingly hard to tell the government's green jobs subsidies apart from the Democrats' friends and family rewards program.

Politics and Money:stuck together like a horse and carriage.....!

Can You Prove This Negative? Melissa Explains it all!

2011-09-26T15:41:00.002-04:00

A Clown Named Harris-Perry comes close to proving one oxymoron-----social sciences are not social nor are they scientific! Here's the first paragraphs of James Taranto's deconstruction of another foolish cretinette:

Obama was helped into office by a wave of racial goodwill. Even many critics and skeptics, including your humble columnist, celebrated his election as the surest sign ever that racism in America was still dead. But if racism is dead--or, to be less hyperbolic, completely marginalized--we're still hearing an awful lot about it, in large part because the liberal left in America is obsessed with race. Even during the campaign, liberals found racism in the unlikeliest places, such as the observation that Obama is skinny. Then the Tea Party arose in opposition to Obama's fiscal recklessness, and phony charges of racism were central to the effort against it.

With the president limping toward 2012, it's safe to assume he and his supporters will try to guilt-trip voters into giving him a second term, arguing that the failure to re-elect him would amount to a betrayal of black America. One who states that case explicitly is Melissa Harris-Perry, a racially oriented political scientist from Tulane University.

"Electoral racism in its most naked, egregious and aggressive form is the unwillingness of white Americans to vote for a black candidate regardless of the candidate's qualifications, ideology or party," she begins an essay in The Nation:

This form of racism was a standard feature of American politics for much of the twentieth century. So far, Barack Obama has been involved in two elections that suggest that such racism is no longer operative. His re-election bid, however, may indicate that a more insidious form of racism has come to replace it.

This is a familiar refrain. The left's view of racism has taken on a central trait of a conspiracy theory: unfalsifiability. The absence of "overt" racism is taken as evidence of "insidious" or "subtle" or "unconscious" racism, the presence of which can always be asserted and never disproved.

Click the link and see how much funnier Melissa gets as she combines illiteracy and lack of a triple-digit IQ to prove how some people get jobs at Tulane which are even dirtier than a janitor's....!!!!

Why Rasmussen is so Accurate and the PPP/CBS polls are not

2011-09-26T14:35:00.004-04:00

Pollsters have biases and this note from The Democratic Strategist from December, 2009, demonstrates just how far off a bias in the methodology will skew the results:

In his recent post, Mark Blumenthal provides an excellent discussion of some of the possible explanations for the differences between the results of Rasmussen polls and the results of other national polls regarding President Obama's approval rating. What needs to be emphasized, however, is that regardless of the explanation for these differences, whether they stem from Rasmussen's use of a likely voter sample, their use of four response options instead of the usual two, or their IVR methodology, the frequency of their polling on this question means that Rasmussen's results have a very disproportionate impact on the overall polling average on the presidential approval question. As of this writing (December 4th), the overall average for net presidential approval (approval - disapproval) on pollster.com is +0.7%. The average without Rasmussen is +7.1%. No other polling organization has nearly this large an impact on the overall average.

A similar impact is seen on the generic ballot question reflecting, again, both the divergence between Rasmussen's results and those of other polls and the frequency of Rasmussen's polling on this question. The overall average Democratic lead on pollster.com is 0.7%. However, with Rasmussen removed that lead jumps to 6.7%. Again, no other polling organization has this large an impact on the overall average.

According to Rasmussen, Republicans currently enjoy a 7 point lead on the generic ballot question among likely voters. Democracy Corps, the only other polling organization currently using a likely voter sample, gives Democrats a 2 point lead on this question. To underscore the significance of this difference, an analysis of the relationship between popular vote share and seat share in the House of Representatives indicates that a 7 point Republican margin of victory in the national popular vote next November would result in a GOP pickup of 62 seats in the House, giving them a majority of 239 to 196 over the Democrats in the new Congress. This would represent an even more dramatic shift in power than the 1994 midterm election that brought Republicans back to power in Congress. In contrast, a 2 point Democratic margin in the national popular vote would be expected to produce a GOP pickup of only 24 seats, leaving Democrats with a comfortable 234 to 201 seat majority.

Of course, Rasmussen's honest polling methods were only one seat off eleven months before the actual elections in November, 2010, when the GOP won 63 instead of the 62 predicted. The Democrats, like all leftists, lie to themselves and their constituents, which makes their polling methods and results the comic funhouse mirror absurdities that we see in PPP or the usual CBS polling, which always selects more Dems than the national pct. and doesn't ask about likely voters or even voter registration. The elaborate hoaxes Dem pollsters regularly pull off on the gullible public would put Bernie Madoff to shame. But the Democratic Strategist crew compound their absurdly dishonest "scientific" claims by making another one-liner straight from Homer Simpson's neuron ruts:

Moreover, Rasmussen has been less than totally open about their method of identifying likely voters at this early stage of the 2010 campaign, making any evaluation of their results even more difficult. However, there is one question on which a more direct comparison of Rasmussen's results with those of other national polls is possible--party identification. Although the way Rasmussen asks the party identification question is somewhat different, reflecting its IVR methodology, Rasmussen's party identification results, like almost all other national polls, are based on a sample of adult citizens. Despite this fact, in recent months Rasmussen's results have diverged rather dramatically from those of most other national polls by showing a substantially smaller Democratic advantage in party identification. For example, for the month of November, Rasmussen reported a Democratic advantage of only 3 percentage points compared with an average for all other national polls of almost 11 percentage points.

Yes, you Demonrat brainiacs are certainly right on your usual path to self-destruction. Rasmussen must have been wrong about the "average of all other national polls.....," yeah, that's the ticket.

It appears more and more likely that delusion is a significant part of the mental illness commonly called liberalism.

Why Rasmussen is so Accurate and the PPP/CBS polls are not

2011-09-26T14:35:00.003-04:00

Pollsters have biases and this note from The Democratic Strategist from December, 2009, demonstrates just how far off a bias in the methodology will skew the results:

In his recent post, Mark Blumenthal provides an excellent discussion of some of the possible explanations for the differences between the results of Rasmussen polls and the results of other national polls regarding President Obama's approval rating. What needs to be emphasized, however, is that regardless of the explanation for these differences, whether they stem from Rasmussen's use of a likely voter sample, their use of four response options instead of the usual two, or their IVR methodology, the frequency of their polling on this question means that Rasmussen's results have a very disproportionate impact on the overall polling average on the presidential approval question. As of this writing (December 4th), the overall average for net presidential approval (approval - disapproval) on pollster.com is +0.7%. The average without Rasmussen is +7.1%. No other polling organization has nearly this large an impact on the overall average.

A similar impact is seen on the generic ballot question reflecting, again, both the divergence between Rasmussen's results and those of other polls and the frequency of Rasmussen's polling on this question. The overall average Democratic lead on pollster.com is 0.7%. However, with Rasmussen removed that lead jumps to 6.7%. Again, no other polling organization has this large an impact on the overall average.

According to Rasmussen, Republicans currently enjoy a 7 point lead on the generic ballot question among likely voters. Democracy Corps, the only other polling organization currently using a likely voter sample, gives Democrats a 2 point lead on this question. To underscore the significance of this difference, an analysis of the relationship between popular vote share and seat share in the House of Representatives indicates that a 7 point Republican margin of victory in the national popular vote next November would result in a GOP pickup of 62 seats in the House, giving them a majority of 239 to 196 over the Democrats in the new Congress. This would represent an even more dramatic shift in power than the 1994 midterm election that brought Republicans back to power in Congress. In contrast, a 2 point Democratic margin in the national popular vote would be expected to produce a GOP pickup of only 24 seats, leaving Democrats with a comfortable 234 to 201 seat majority.

Moreover, Rasmussen has been less than totally open about their method of identifying likely voters at this early stage of the 2010 campaign, making any evaluation of their results even more difficult. However, there is one question on which a more direct comparison of Rasmussen's results with those of other national polls is possible--party identification. Although the way Rasmussen asks the party identification question is somewhat different, reflecting its IVR methodology, Rasmussen's party identification results, like almost all other national polls, are based on a sample of adult citizens. Despite this fact, in recent months Rasmussen's results have diverged rather dramatically from those of most other national polls by showing a substantially smaller Democratic advantage in party identification. For example, for the month of November, Rasmussen reported a Democratic advantage of only 3 percentage points compared with an average for all other national polls of almost 11 percentage points.

Solyndra: Obama's Marble Boat

2011-09-25T11:48:00.002-04:00

Clarice Feldman writes for The American Thinker and compares the hoax set up by Obama to help his contributors to the famous marble boat that Dowager Empress Cixi had constructed for her sailing pleasure on the lake near her palace in Kunming. China famously went down the tubes in the fifteenth century because its fantastic flair for innovation threatened the Mandarin bureaucrats whose jobs would be in jeopardy if new inventions changed the landscape. Like the Democrats, the Mandarins chose bureaucratic authoritarianism over capitalist innovation.

That's why China spent the next 500 years sliding south toward Antarctica.

Murderous Dwarf Putin on the Rise Again

2011-09-25T10:58:00.003-04:00

Vlad the Empoisoner, the only head of state who routinely murders his opponents by poisoning them in foreign countries, appears ready to return as Stalin Redux. Read the Guardian story about the new book, Mafia State, and then read Chris Andrews and Vlad Mitrokhin's Sword and Shield to see how the old KGB & the new FSB both run the fascist sh*tpit called Russia.

Hemingway Summed Up in a Nutshell by F.Scott Fitzgerald

2011-09-24T06:36:00.003-04:00

Papa's got a gun

Hemingway was for a long time the writer that, as a teenage kid, I wanted to emulate. The tough-guy with a soft heart was what I remember when I first picked up Across The River and into The Trees as a kid of thirteen.

I and my tastes outgrew Hemingway, even though I was told by everyone in my forties that I was his spitting image and should engage in the Key West look-a-like contest, but found the more sensitive, nuanced Fitzgerald better represented my Midwestern roots trying to replant elsewhere.

Alan Massie's new book on Hemingway brings Hemingway's offhand braggadocio and trickiness hiding a more tormented individual to the surface. I'd read Colette and Byron's Travels and now want to read the Hemingway bio. I'm also looking forward to his massive history of the Stuarts.

Like Anthony Burgess, Massie is an admirer of Hemingway with a keen appreciation of just how far short this over-hyped hyper-American stole the stage from better, if less self-promoting writers like Fitzgerald. Hemingway supposedly converted to Catholicism twice and then abjured that faith twice, surely a sign of the deeper struggles raging inside his soul.

Fitzgerald, whose book Tender in the Night, which I read during my honeymoon, according to Massie sums up Hemingway better in two sentences than anyone else ever did. The tormented Dick Driver could have been talking about F. Scott's former friend, who rose to prominence on Fitzgerald's fulsome praise in the early twenties, by this quote of Massie's:

"The change came a long way back—but at first it didn't show. The manner remains intact for some time after the morale cracks."

Read the excellent review by the WSJ at the link above. I've read several books about Hemingway and most of his novels and short stories, but Massie's keen insights are among the best I've ever come across.

Gallup Says 55% of Americans distrust the lame stream MSM

2011-09-23T12:12:00.002-04:00

Gallup makes an unusual comment on its graph....

"the 55% who have little or no trust remain among the most negative views Gallup has measured."

Of course, the graphs demonstrate that the vast majority of Americans believe that the libtard lamestream losers at the NYT and LAT are retarded treasonous buttwads.

Gallup sums it up with:

"47% saying the media are too liberal and 13% saying they are too conservative..."

which shows once again that the American people are much smarter than Bri-boy Williams, the d-bag at CBS & Diane Sawyer take them to be.

Case in point: The main legacy media alphabet lame streamers like NBC, CBS, and ABC had ZERO coverage of the Greengate emerging from Solyndra, LightSquared and other crony capitalism deals that tiny Rahm and the crooked Jew Axelrod deny knowing anything about. NADA, except for Brian Ross & Jake Tapper on ABC, which makes it the least despicable collection of DNC pimps in the bunch.

Bad Days Ahead for Europe and its NATO Partner in North America

2011-09-20T06:31:00.002-04:00

The Wall Street Journal has a good column by Bret Stephens which fits in nicely with my current reading of Tony Judt's magnificent POSTWAR, a book that should be required reading for Euroweenies everywhere.

As a personal aside, Nikos Papandreaou, the brother of the current Prime Minister, had a one-on-one dinner with me a couple of decades ago and explained the essential corruption of the Greek economy, which is based on no civic accountability and massive tax evasion, plus a giant dose of sheer graft and peculation. Essentially, in Greece everyone lies to everyone else and a wink and a nod are what make the country muddle through from day to day. At the time, his father was the Prime Minister, and his description of an essentially fraudulent state puzzled me. He described it as a third-world country, long before it was foolishly admitted into the Maastricht Accords and the Eurozone. Greece was even back then guilty of massive fraud of a Madoff-size Ponzi numbers scam just to get into the Eurozone and get all that free money. And Nikos laughingly described his countrymen as self-described political experts, who sat around coffee shops all day while the women did the housework and their state-sector jobs did themselves by means of a coat hanging on a chair in their government "office."

Here's Bret Stephens:

When the history of the rise and fall of postwar Western Europe is someday written, it will come in three volumes. Title them "Hard Facts," "Convenient Fictions" and—the volume still being written—"Fraud."

The hardest fact on which postwar Europe was founded was military necessity, crisply summed up by Lord Ismay's famous line that NATO's mission was "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." The next hard fact was hard money, the gift of Ludwig Erhard, author of the economic reforms that created the Deutsche mark, abolished price controls, and put inflation in check for generations. The third hard fact was the creation of Jean Monnet's common market that gave Europe a shared economic—not political—identity.

The result was the Wirtschaftswunder in Germany, Les Trente Glorieuses in France and il miracolo economico in Italy. It could have lasted into the present day. It didn't.

In 1965, government spending as a percentage of GDP averaged 28% in Western Europe. Today it hovers just under 50%. In 1965, the fertility rate in Germany was a healthy 2.5 children per mother. Today it is a catastrophic 1.35. During the postwar years, annual GDP growth in Europe averaged 5.5%. After 1973, it rarely exceeded 2.3%. In 1973, Europeans worked 102 hours for every 100 worked by an American. By 2004 they worked just 82 hours for every 100 American ones.

Former FDIC official Vern McKinley gives a brief history of moral hazard.

It was during this general slowdown that Europe entered the convenient fiction phase.

There was, for starters, the convenient fiction that if you just added up the GDP of the European Union's expanding list of member states, you had an economy whose size exceeded that of the United States. Didn't this make "Europe" an economic superpower? There was the convenient fiction that Europe didn't need robust military capabilities when it could exert global influence through diplomacy and soft power. There was the convenient fiction that Europeans shared identical values and could thus be subject to uniform regulations governing crime and punishment. There was the convenient fiction that Continentals weren't lagging in productivity but were simply making an enlightened choice of leisure over labor.

And there was, finally, the whopping fiction that Europe had its own "model," distinct and superior to the American one, that immunized it from broader international currents: globalization, Islamism, demography. Europeans love their holidays and thought they were entitled to a long holiday from history as well.

All this did wonders, for a while, to mask European failures and puff up European pride. But there is always a danger in substituting grandiosity for achievement, mistaking pronouncements for facts, or, more generally, believing in your own nonsense.

Here is where Europe slipped from convenient fiction to outright fraud.

There was the fraud of Greece's entry into the euro, a double-edged affair since Athens lied about its budgetary figures and Brussels chose to accept the lie. There was the fraud of the so-called Maastricht criteria—the fiscal rules that were supposed to govern the euro only to be quickly flouted by France and Germany and then junked altogether in the current crisis. There was the fraud of the European Constitution, overwhelmingly rejected wherever a vote on it was permitted, only to be revised and imposed by parliamentary fiat.

What is now happening in Europe isn't so much a crisis as it is an exposure: a Madoff-type event rather than a Lehman one. The shock is that it's a shock. Greece was never going to be bailed out and will, sooner or later, default. The banks holding Greek debt will, sooner or later, be recapitalized. The recapitalization will be borne by German taxpayers, and it will bring them—sooner rather than later—to the outer limit of their forbearance. The Chinese will not ride to the rescue: They know not to throw good money after bad.

And then Italy will go Greek. Europe's crisis will lap on U.S. shores, and America's economic woes will lap on Europe's—a two-way tsunami.

America will survive this because America is a state. But as Bismarck once remarked, "Whoever speaks of Europe is wrong. Europe is a geographical expression." The "fiscal union" that's being mooted will never come to pass: German voters won't stand for it, and neither will any other country that wants to retain fiscal independence—which is to say, the core attribute of democratic sovereignty.

What comes next is the explosion of the European project. Given what European leaders have made of that project over the past 30-odd years, it's not an altogether bad thing. But it will come at a massive cost. The riots of Athens will become those of Milan, Madrid and Marseilles. Parties of the fringe will gain greater sway. Border checkpoints will return. Currencies will be resurrected, then devalued. Countries will choose decay over reform. It's a long, likely parade of horribles.

Where is the Europe of Ismay, Erhard and Monnet? It's there in memory, if anyone cares to recover it. Give it another 50 years, and maybe someone will.

Nouriel Roubini, the only major economist to predict the 2007-8 crash, expatiates:

Greece is stuck in a vicious cycle of insolvency, low competitiveness and ever-deepening depression. Exacerbated by a draconian fiscal austerity, its public debt is heading towards 200 per cent of gross domestic product. To escape, Greece must now begin an orderly default, voluntarily exit the eurozone and return to the drachma.

The recent debt exchange deal Europe offered Greece was a rip-off, providing much less debt relief than the country needed. If you pick apart the figures, and take into account the large sweeteners the plan gave to creditors, the true debt relief is actually close to zero. The country’s best current option would be to reject this agreement and, under threat of default, renegotiate a better one.

Yet even if Greece were soon to be given real and significant relief on its public debt, it cannot return to growth unless competitiveness is rapidly restored. And without a return to growth, its debts will stay unsustainable. Problematically, however, all of the options that might restore competitiveness require real currency depreciation.

The first of these options, a sharp weakening of the euro, is unlikely while the US is economically weak and Germany über-competitive. A rapid reduction in unit labour costs, through structural reforms that increased productivity growth in excess of wages, is just as unlikely. Germany took 10 years to restore its competitiveness this way; Greece cannot wait in depression for a decade.

The third option is a rapid deflation in prices and wages, known as an “internal devaluation”. But this would lead to five years of ever-deepening depression, while making public debts more unsustainable.

Logically, therefore, if those three options are not possible, the only path left is to leave the eurozone. A return to a national currency and a sharp depreciation would quickly restore competitiveness and growth, as it did in Argentina and many other emerging markets that abandoned their currency pegs.

Of course, this process will be traumatic. The most significant problem would be capital losses for core eurozone financial institutions. Overnight, the foreign euro liabilities of Greece’s government, banks and companies would surge. Yet these problems can be overcome. Argentina did so in 2001, when it “pesified” its dollar debts. America actually did something similar too, in 1933 when it depreciated the dollar by 69 per cent and repealed the gold clause. A similar unilateral “drachmatisation” of euro debts would be necessary and unavoidable.

Major eurozone banks and investors would also suffer large losses in this process, but they would be manageable too – if these institutions are properly and aggressively recapitalised. Avoiding a post-exit implosion of the Greek banking system, however, may unfortunately require the imposition of Argentine-style measures – such as bank holidays and capital controls – to prevent a disorderly fallout.

Realistically, collateral damage will occur, but this could be limited if the exit process is orderly, and if international support was provided to recapitalise Greek banks and finance the difficult fiscal and external balance transition. Some argue that Greece’s real GDP will be much lower in an exit scenario than in the hard slog of deflation. But this is logically flawed: even with deflation the real purchasing power of the Greek economy and of its wealth will fall as the real depreciation occurs. Via nominal and real depreciation, the exit path will restore growth right away, avoiding a decade-long depressionary deflation.

Those who claim contagion will drag others into the crisis are also in denial too. Other peripheral countries have Greek-style debt sustainability and competitiveness problems too; Portugal, for example, may eventually have to restructure its debt and exit the euro too.

Illiquid but potentially solvent economies, such as Italy and Spain, will need support from Europe regardless of whether Greece exits; indeed, a self-fulfilling run on Italy and Spain’s public debt at this point is almost certain, if this liquidity support is not provided. The substantial official resources currently being wasted bailing out Greece’s private creditors could also then be used to ringfence these countries, and banks elsewhere in the periphery.

A Greek exit may have secondary benefits. Other crisis-stricken eurozone economies will then have a chance to decide for themselves whether they want to follow suit, or remain in the euro, with all the costs that come with that choice. Regardless of what Greece does, eurozone banks now need to be rapidly recapitalised. For this a new European Union-wide programme is needed, and one not reliant on fudged estimates and phoney stress tests. A Greek exit could be the catalyst for this approach.

The recent experiences of Iceland, along with many emerging markets in the past 20 years, show that the orderly restructuring and reduction of foreign debts can restore debt sustainability, competitiveness and growth. Just as in these cases, the collateral damage to Greece of a euro exit will be significant, but it can be contained.

Like a broken marriage that requires a break-up, it is better to have rules that make separation less costly to both sides. Breaking up and divorcing is painful and costly, even when such rules exist. Make no mistake: an orderly euro exit will be hard. But watching the slow disorderly implosion of the Greek economy and society will be much worse.

David Brooks: A Self-Admitted "Sap" Confesses his Past Sins of Omission

2011-09-20T05:19:00.004-04:00

David Brooks seems to have rewired his attic and his lights are now turning on in the top floor of his brain cavity:

...When the president unveiled the second half of his stimulus it became clear that this package has nothing to do with helping people right away or averting a double dip. This is a campaign marker, not a jobs bill.

It recycles ideas that couldn’t get passed even when Democrats controlled Congress. In his remarks Monday the president didn’t try to win Republicans to even some parts of his measures. He repeated the populist cries that fire up liberals but are designed to enrage moderates and conservatives.

He claimed we can afford future Medicare costs if we raise taxes on the rich. He repeated the old half-truth about millionaires not paying as much in taxes as their secretaries. (In reality, the top 10 percent of earners pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes, according to the I.R.S. People in the richest 1 percent pay 31 percent of their income to the federal government while the average worker pays less than 14 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office.)

This wasn’t a speech to get something done. This was the sort of speech that sounded better when Ted Kennedy was delivering it. The result is that we will get neither short-term stimulus nor long-term debt reduction anytime soon, and I’m a sap for thinking it was possible.

David and his high-minded admiration for the crease on Obama's well-tailored bespoke suit had been mesmerized for years by the flatulent flimflammery this community organizer with a flair for self-promotion had beguiled the gullible "brain-dead liberals," as David Mamet would characterize them, with all sorts of intriguing back alleys of political ingenuity---calling something "shovel-ready" when there was a union-restricted proviso attached to the infrastructure improvement being proposed. David was a center-left dupe or fellow-traveler of this protean chimera of a politician, whose only identity seems to be that of a shape-shifter or a chameleon-on-plaid, Brooks was gulled because he is a natural egghead, and his ideals take many blows before he allows them to shatter, or in this case disappear into a cultural-revolution type confession of "crimes against the people." But, like a much finer mind such as that of Augustine or Whittaker Chambers, perhaps this self-confessed "sap" may have finally seen the light. Here's more of his lugubrious musings:

....The president is sounding like the Al Gore for President campaign, but without the earth tones. Tax increases for the rich! Protect entitlements! People versus the powerful! I was hoping the president would give a cynical nation something unconventional, but, as you know, I’m a sap.

Being a sap, I still believe that the president’s soul would like to do something about the country’s structural problems. I keep thinking he’s a few weeks away from proposing serious tax reform and entitlement reform. But each time he gets close, he rips the football away. He whispered about seriously reforming Medicare but then opted for changes that are worthy but small. He talks about fundamental tax reform, but I keep forgetting that he has promised never to raise taxes on people in the bottom 98 percent of the income scale.

That means when he talks about raising revenue, which he is right to do, he can’t really talk about anything substantive. He can’t tax gasoline. He can’t tax consumption. He can’t do a comprehensive tax reform. He has to restrict his tax policy changes to the top 2 percent, and to get any real revenue he’s got to hit them in every which way. We’re not going to simplify the tax code, but by God Obama’s going to raise taxes on rich people who give to charity! We’ve got to do something to reduce the awful philanthropy surplus plaguing this country!

The president believes the press corps imposes a false equivalency on American politics. We assign equal blame to both parties for the dysfunctional politics when in reality the Republicans are more rigid and extreme. There’s a lot of truth to that, but at least Republicans respect Americans enough to tell us what they really think. The White House gives moderates little morsels of hope, and then rips them from our mouths. To be an Obama admirer is to toggle from being uplifted to feeling used.

The White House has decided to wage the campaign as fighting liberals. I guess I understand the choice, but I still believe in the governing style Obama talked about in 2008. I may be the last one. I’m a sap.

Writing a letter to the NYT is like shedding a tear in the ocean when it comes to politics, but here's my latest comment I submitted on David Brooks column:

It's apparent that Obama's absurd new package of roughly $1.5 trillion in "revenue enhancements," removal of tax deductions on charitable contributions and dozens of other tax and spend schemes are, as Brooks finally concedes, simply political markers without a chance of passing in Congress. Rather than having a "Sister Soljah moment" as Clinton did when he pivoted to the center, Obama appears to have doubled down on some sort of "Give 'Em Hell, Harry" strategy and will soon be whining about the "Do-Nothing 111th Congress" or some such silly frontal attack on the GOP. It worked when everyone thought Truman's chances were slim or nil, and Obama's economic haplessness assures another year of no growth.

The top US earners are already double-taxed on capital gains and Obama is removing any motivation to invest in a country which punishes entrepreneurial risk-taking and rewards falling into the 51% of the population, mostly Democrats, who pay no taxes at all. Why invest when regulatory watchdogs and excessive imposts remove any real chance or incentive to succeed. First, Sarbanes-Oxley and now Dodd-Frank are paralyzing the American business environment---and if in the remote chance, one succeeds in innovating or marketing a viable product, without the political backing such as Solyndra had, one's chances of success recede to a vanishing point.

Obama is anti-business and for a mixed-economic regime resembling the corporatist crony capitalism of the Thirties. Despite the efforts of the elite media and academic theoreticians, he is simply going to lose this battle against a windmill of his own imagining.

And Obama'a high-minded rhetorical pomposity is now descending to the silliness of "gun-to-a-knife-fight" bravado and resembles marxist tropes of setting up class warfare as a model for democratic politics. He should be ashamed of himself. A one-termer for sure.

Obama Says "Never Raise Taxes in a Recession" in 2009

2011-09-19T22:42:00.002-04:00

Upchuck Todd shows his slavish adulation of O'Bozo in this YouTube where the First Imbecile-in-Chief since Jimmy Carter says something which he is in the process of reversing at this very moment, having called for $1.5 trillion in new revenues just yesterday.

I'm sure serial-suck-up Todd will ignore this, or else come up with some flimflammery such as "we're not technically in a recession, yet."

On top of Fast and Furious and the Greengate called Solyndra, our worst POTUS since Jimmy Carter now calls for massive tax increases, all the while denying that he's doing what he told Joe The Plumber he was doing, "spreading the wealth around."

White House Economic In-Fighting Reflects Obungler's Lack of Leadership

2011-09-19T10:58:00.002-04:00

Robert Suskind has a book out that should rival The Big Short and Reckless Endangerment as object lessons or at least as a cautionary tale of the rampant self-serving special pleading of disobedient subordinates of this "community organizer" about six levels over his Peter Principle level of competence & capability.

Also, dissing the distaff advisors should have extended tot he egregious Ms. Warren who has shuffled back to Hah-vahd Yahd to organize a Senate expeditionary campaign that hopefully will hit an iceberg bigger than the one that sank the Titanic. Christine Romer says that even Obama didn't bother to recognize her during a meeting, but she put her tail between her legs and took it like a man....!!!

However, ignoring Anita Dunn and her absurdities, including admiring Chairman Mao's "philosophy" [of mass murder???] was probably beneficial to the intellectual tone, such as it was, of the back-stabbing sessions as described by Suskind. Anita's double-digit IQ produced brain farts which could only be ignored in any polite or intelligent discussion of politics and policies.

Muddled Class Warfare

2011-09-19T10:51:00.001-04:00

If you want to find the most biased, marxist gibberish among the loons of the lefty commentariat, read the insufferable Robert Kuttner on how Paul Ryan's comment that taxing more heavily those with money to invest in the economy and to do venture capital risk investments in small start-up businesses is "pure malarkey."

Actually, a majority of Americans are intelligent enough and gifted with common sense to the degree that they realize that those college profs preaching marxist theories of how businessmen parasitize off of the workers they hire is pure and simple balderdash.

And the Dodd-Frank bill to drown financial institutions in paperwork is as loony as the Sarbanes attempt a few years back to do the same. Politicize, then bureaucratize, then threaten banks with discriminatory practices if they "red-line" folks wanting a mortgage by asking them if they have any up-front money and a job to pay the monthly mortgage. The CRA was a crackpot idea of Jimmy Carter, the least successful president of the twentieth century, Hoover included, and it was taken up again by Clinton to stave off the left after he dared to impose welfare reform on hopeless slackers.

Class warfare is a polite way to characterize the economic havoc that will ensue if Obama continues to tax and spend----especially spend money he can't tax because of a diminishing employment base.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

NYT's Crusade Against Football More Absurd Than Ever

2011-09-18T05:30:00.002-04:00

Pinch Sulzberger is obviously too effeminate, despite ostentatiously riding Harleys around the hills of North Carolina, to ever support a manly sport like college football.

Theodore Roosevelt saved football from the effeminate losers such as Pinch back in the early 1900s when girly-men like Sulzberger wanted the game outlawed. Robert Hutchins would probably have preferred the US to have lost the Cold War and have us all speaking Russian than participate in a real manly male enterprise. Pointy-headed eggheads like him and Adlai Stevenson would have surrendered to the Soviets rather than risk getting their hands dirty in anything like an armed confrontation. POTUS's like Dwight Eisenhower, an All-American at West Point, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan all played football.

Democrats are nancy-boys, so they don't like to play rough sports---although JFK tried out for the Hah-vahd team, I understand.

Islam: "Religion of Peace" or a Terrorist Death Cult?

2011-09-18T04:55:00.003-04:00

As a long-time student of the Middle East, I also happen to be a State Dept-trained Arabist who has lived in three Arab countries as Political Officer---Lebanon, Saudi Arabia & Yemen. Pakistan is not an Arab country, but its virulent brand of Islam is worse than the Salafist Wahhabism that keeps Saudi Arabia culturally and socially in the 16th century, AD.

The official murder sanctioned by the Pakistani government with no legal representation of this young woman demonstrates the barbarity of the entire country and the cowardice of the worst president in the history of the USA since Jimmy Carter---or maybe James Buchanan. Hillary Clinton, the laughable Secretary of State is worse than Warren Christopher or Madeleine Albright as a complete moral failure and diplomatic featherweight when it comes to representing American values in the international arena.

I personally made over a dozen business trips to Pakistan in the 1980s and was a personal friend of Arnie Raphel, our US Ambassador murdered there by terrorists, or perhaps murdered by ISI, since President Zia Al-Haqq was also killed in the plane that blew up in mid-air just after picking up a huge load of mangoes [yes, MANGOES!] from Multan, which I can assert grows the tastiest in the world. ISI is a terrorist organization that makes the CIA look like a finishing school and the KGB like a goodwill organization. ISI's terrorist cadres are fighting America and aiding Al Qaeda and are also responsible for the Mumbai massacre almost two years ago. The Paks are accomplished liars as well as specimens of canine breeding and porcine hygiene---Founding President Jinnah used to enjoy eating pork and bacon, just to demonstrate the essential hypocrisy and fraudulent fake religiosity of this collection of human riff-raff. I say open our country to non-Muslim Indians and throw out the Paki imbeciles and morons who have sneaked into the USA.

I say this even though I still have my honorary marshal's badge for Pakistan Day in New York City back in the mid-'80s. I was working for Denis Neal and Charlie Wilson back then as well, and met a lot of Pakis---even gave a speech to their political PAC convocation at the Commodore Hotel in New York City in 1986.

I had the opportunity to have a half-hour interview with the number two ISI Chief at the time and it didn't go very well. He was a brutish specimen of nasty arrogance. I've been in every part of Pakistan except the Beluchi part and it is a beautiful country, but is now governed by terrorists and an Army riddled by corruption, treason, & hatred for the USA.

Despite the sacrifices of our brave fighting men, my firmest hope is that the USA let the Taliban take over Afghanistan & Pakistan, so we and India can nuke the sh*t out of these two Islamic hellholes. Ditto for Iran. I also happen to be a State Dept trained Arabist who has lived in three Arab countries---the Pakistanis also persecute what they consider heretical types of Sunni Islam and the Shi'ites as well---however, as they are both terrorist states, the Paks get along well officially with Iran.

Sadly, the PRC is the true friend of Pakistan & got the stealth helicopter parts left behind in the killing of POS Osama bin Laden. Pakistan isn't worth one US life and represents Islam at its worst. A sort of Fareed Zakaria as if he were a country----full of lies, BS, and treachery.
UPDATE Admiral Mullen met with the chief Pakistani about the Haqqani network being run out of ISI which is killing Americans in Kabul and Afghanistan & Indians in Mumbai. I doubt if he'll get anything but the usual lies or defiance by the specimen of murderous thug he's meeting with.

Obama "Jobs" Bill Helps Unions, Blue States in Deep Debt

2011-09-18T01:49:00.002-04:00

Obama's RICO scheme aims to give the lion's share of all monies from his "Jobs" bill to blue states.

Last Thursday, the president urged Congress to pony up roughly $200 billion in taxpayer money to "provide more jobs for teachers [and] more jobs for construction workers" and more money to carry out other state and local activities. He urges Congress to spend this money even after handing out hundreds of billions of dollars for similar purposes as part of the 2009 stimulus package, as well as a score and more billion dollars again in 2010.

These vast contributions to the coffers of state and local governments, though pitched as a jobs bill, are in reality the latest in a series of bailouts for debt-ridden state and local governments. They are of special benefit to states in the blue regions of the country where the president's most fervent supporters reside.

In many blue states, legislators have copied the politicians in Washington by running up state debts to extraordinary levels. Nationwide, state debt is running around $3 trillion. If unfunded pension liabilities are factored in, estimated liabilities leap forward by another $1 trillion to $3 trillion, depending on the optimism of the assumptions made.

The crook in the Oval Office is scaring the bond markets....

The bond market has taken notice. Before the 2008 financial crisis, state sovereign debt was just about the safest place to invest. Because investors did not pay taxes on the interest, states were able to borrow money at rates below those paid for federal securities. With the onset of the financial crisis, not only did borrowing costs rise across the board, but differences in interest rates among states widened dramatically. Bond holders concluded that some states, like Greece, had been extraordinarily profligate and, even worse, lacked the will to rein in their expenditures.

In a new study at Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance, we discovered why the Obama administration is so interested in helping out the states. States with a bluish hue—that is, states with legislatures that are heavily Democratic and have a highly unionized public-sector work force—must pay interest rates that are often an extra half a percentage point higher than states with a reddish coloring.

Specifically, a 20 percentage-point increment in either the Democratic share of the state legislature or a comparable increase in the share of the public work force that is unionized drives up interest rates by nearly a half a percentage point on a five-year security note. That amount is nontrivial. In Obama's home state of Illinois, it is costing governments over $700 million annually.

The impact of these political factors on interest rates is in addition to the impact of standard economic factors, such as a state's unemployment rate, its gross domestic product growth, and its debt-to-GDP ratio, all of which are themselves shaped in part by the state's political climate.

In short, the bond market has concluded that the more unionized the state and the bluer its political coloring, the riskier it is to hold bonds marketed by that state.

Why doesn't this pimp just stand out under a street light and attract suckers to his sick economic policies?

When it comes to fiscal sovereignty, U.S. federalism is exceptional. Hardly any other country in the world has anything like it. Only Switzerland and Canada—two nations that aren't doing that badly these days—come close.

But federal fiscal bailouts put our federal system at risk. In essence, the national government is acting as if states are too big to fail. In the next financial crisis, the federal government may decide that states need to be treated like General Motors or, at least, be given ever bigger handouts of the kind the Obama administration seems committed to making.

But if the federal government is going to tacitly assume responsibility for state debts, then those $3 trillion in sovereign state debt must be added to the $14 trillion national debt that has already caused grave concern, pushing the current U.S. debt into the danger zone. Even if pension liabilities are ignored, the combined federal-state-local debt runs in excess of 120% of GDP.

The costs go beyond dollars and cents. The more often the federal government bails out the states, the more Washington bureaucrats will insist on regulating state and local affairs. At some point the United States will see the end of state fiscal sovereignty and the demise our federal system of government.

The Supreme Court should stop this cat burglar from ruining the rest of our economy by dragging profligate states like
California, New York & Illinois plus a few other red-light districts into his destruction of the American Way of Life.

Even repeat-cheat CBS has O'Bozo at 43% Approval

2011-09-17T00:48:00.002-04:00

CBS News habitually has more Dems than independents or Republicans in its horribly-biased polls, so this is actually newsworthy only because it's the first time ever their silly polling unit has ever admitted the man-child is dumber than dirt [or that's what I infer from the numbers.]

Wonder what the PPP Jensen Poll, owned & run by the DNC, is going to come out with.

Gallup and other halfway-decent polls have Obummer's economic numbers at around 30% approval. The Dems should ask Hillarious to step up to the plate---Barry Soetero or whoever he is appears to be toasting quite nicely in the national kitchen.

Changelessly Hopeless

2011-09-17T00:39:00.002-04:00

CNBC has this about "Hope for Future?":

Americans remained gloomy about the future with a gauge of expectations falling to the lowest level since 1980, a survey released Friday showed.

Read the entire article, but I believe Sarah Palin's immortal "How's that hopey-changey thing workin' out for you?" is the appropriate insertion of just how disillusioned the USA is with this failed "community organizer."

D-bag historian Simon Shama tells libtard-C-in-C Charlie Rose that the NYT editorial page continues to be "brilliant." Maybe Shama should put on some tinted glasses or do something or perhaps drop that "a" from the end of his name to clarify his ethical and moral stature.

Perry has Love of Politics in his Veins---Rich Lowry

2011-09-16T16:50:00.002-04:00

Lame-duck Obummer had better watch out---and Mitt Romney had better get a personality, because Gov. Perry has just ridden into town and he ain't taking prisoners....

Even during the debates, where his performances have been uneven, Perry has usually been loose and confident. He never shies from a fight, and (most of the time) seems to enjoy them. He laughs easily. No one would vote to elect him to the Oxford Union, but if it somehow happened, he’d have a heck of a time exchanging frank views with “the fellas.”

What we’re about to see is if these qualities of Perry — call it his “hossness” — are enough for him to become the durable frontrunner in the Republican-nomination fight. He can go a long way just by demonstrating he’s a fighter in the mold of a Sarah Palin or a Donald Trump. That means making the occasional incendiary comment, never apologizing, earning the hatred of the elites, and not sweating the details. All of this, Perry has nailed.

But to become president of the United States, he’ll have to reach persuadables who don’t value outrageousness for its own sake. If he’s never willing to back down, he’ll have to go — should he win the nomination — all the way to November 2012 defending the notion that Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is possibly guilty of treason. On Social Security, he’s managed to take what turns out to be his thoroughly conventional Republican view that the program should stay the same for seniors and near-retirees while it’s reformed for younger people and make it radioactive through his choice of words and his theoretical musings. His campaign so far has no policy except generalized statements celebrating Texas and condemning the federal government.

Tellingly, his weakest moments in the debates have come when he’s been attacked from the right and can’t fight back with brassy, crowd-pleasing one-liners. He’s made uncomfortable by his streak of pragmatism as Texas governor. For all his self-portrayal as an anti-government purist, he’s adept at marshaling and using power. When he says he’s pro-business, he’s not kidding. Republicans will have to quickly drop the phrase “crony capitalism” from their vocabulary if he’s the nominee.

In this year of populist discontent, the blunt outsider Rick Perry has a natural call on the Republican heart. The question is whether he can maintain enough appeal over time to the Republican mind, which will eventually calculate the odds of a prospective nominee vanquishing the incumbent. Whether Perry makes it or not, he’ll never be dull. If success were solely a matter of animal spirits, he’d be a lead-pipe cinch.

Of course, how his tougher than nails and nasty in-your-face persona plays with the independents is the key. And he doesn't look like he wants to pussyfoot and play pattycake with the meth-NBC crew of pirate bolshies.

Eurozone May be Saved by Dallar's Liquidity

2011-09-16T05:09:00.003-04:00

Dollar Rides to the Rescue is the gist of a Wall Street Journal article replete with ironies that even the dumbest Euroweenies can't miss. But the whining from the Eurosnobs in Frogland didn't stop there---

The central-bank move is a de facto admission that dollar funding has been drying up for many European banks. We warned on June 27 ("Money-Market Mayhem") about the dangers to U.S. money funds from their lending to banks heavily invested in Greek and other sovereign debt. The money-fund lobby said we were exaggerating, but the funds have since cut their lending dramatically. This is prudent, since the world doesn't need a repeat of 2008 when a U.S. money fund broke its $1 net asset value.

The problem is that this withdrawal by money funds reduces the options for European banks to finance their dollar-lending operations. Moody's downgraded two of the three biggest French banks on Wednesday, citing liquidity and short-term funding needs. The CEO of Societe Generale—one of the downgraded banks, with Credit Agricole—said his bank was "adjusting to the reduction in the money-market fund exposure."

It gets funnier still when the ENArch fuddy-duddies sniffed yesterday at the WSJ for daring to publish a piece by a French banker about their shortcomings.

We [at the WSJ] received our own immersion in the issue this week after we published an op-ed Tuesday by contributor Nicolas Lecaussin quoting an unnamed executive from BNP Paribas as saying the bank had lost its access to dollar funding. BNP immediately said it was "fully able to obtain USD funding in the normal course of business, either directly or through swaps." It also acknowledged a "reduction and shortening of resources" from U.S. money funds.

In its official statement, BNP Paribas said only that its borrowing from U.S. money funds had recently declined to €36 billion outstanding from €46 billion, so we asked the bank to support its claim that it was "fully able" to meet its dollar needs. BNP's treasurer, Michel Eydoux, elaborated in an interview that "some of the money market funds have not renewed" their loans and others are of shorter maturities—generally one month instead of three to 12 months previously.

He said BNP is thus relying more on foreign-exchange swap contracts for its dollar needs. The counterparties to these swaps are, according to Mr. Eydoux, "banks and corporations who want the same maturities" that BNP is seeking and can no longer obtain from the money markets. The bank is also trying to expand its dollar deposit base among corporations and governments in Asia and Middle East that need someplace to keep their dollars.

Much to our surprise, BNP Paribas also requested that the French equivalent of the SEC, the Autorité des Marchés Financiers, "open an investigation into the publication of erroneous information about its funding in dollars in an article in the Opinions section of the Wall Street Journal."

The AMF is "tasked with safeguarding investments and maintaining orderly financial markets in France" and it can also conduct investigations, although by its own account its jurisdiction does not normally extend to the press. An official at the AMF declined to say how often newspaper articles lead to investigations.

Meanwhile, a senior French government official called us "as a reader," he said, to express his shock that we had published Mr. Lecaussin's op-ed. The article, he said, "was quite damaging to this bank and to French banks generally." At least he conceded that perhaps he was "abusing his position" as a top government official to express his displeasure.

We certainly hope the French government and BNP intention isn't to shut down reporting on French bank problems. We can't imagine, say, White House chief of staff Bill Daley calling us about a story on Bank of America, or BofA siccing the SEC on us. Relations between banks and the government are closer in France than they are in the U.S., but we'd have thought French politicians had enough problems without picking a fight over press freedom.

All the more so because we're far from the only messengers. In a report last week, JP Morgan analysts argued that French banks as a group had one of the lowest ratios of highly liquid assets to short-term funding needs in Europe. JP Morgan pegged BNP's so-called liquidity-coverage ratio at 70%. When asked about that figure, one BNP official sputtered that JP Morgan's own coverage ratio was only 52%. Under the Basel III international banking standards, banks are required to achieve a 100% liquidity-coverage ratio by 2015.

The funding status of French banks is news because fears of 2008 are still fresh and Europe's woes could spill into U.S. banks and the larger world financial system. Europe's banks have done far less than American banks since 2008 to strengthen their capital base, own up to their bad assets, and generally clean up their act. Until they do, the world's lenders will treat them with well-deserved wariness.

Ca alors! Qu'est-ce qui se passe? On ose mentionner que les enarques sont des imbeciles dans l'Haute Politique & concernant des affaire foncieres? Que les sales 'ricans et leurs dollars .......!

Nobel Physics Laureate Resigns APS over AGW Hoax

2011-09-16T05:03:00.002-04:00

Pope Pius IX caused a furor in 1870 when he declared that any Catholic dogma proclaimed by the Pope is "infallible," if he speaks ex cathedra.Read the linked story on how and why a Renssalaer Professor who won his Nobel in 1973 disagrees that

the theory that man's actions have inexorably led to the warming of the planet, through increased emissions of carbon dioxide.

Fox News and Climate Depot have stories on how the Anthropogenic Global Warming Hoax is being discredited as an example of "Cargo Cult Science" of the type Richard Feynman warned about in his famous CalTech 1974 commencement address .

Pinball Wizard Starts to lose his touch?

2011-09-14T04:36:00.002-04:00

Che Lives in My Oval Office in Spirit and in my Bolshie Policies

Bob Turner defeated a liberal Demonrat named Weprin who was a State Assemblyman in the Weinergate run-off special election, showing GOP strength in a district that had NEVER elected a Republican---although its Catholic & Orthodox Jewish constituencies are more conservative than most of Brooklyn/Queens bolshie netherlands.....

I just can't wait for the WH comment tomorrow or how the mentally-retarded Baghdad Bobs of the liberal Demonrat commentariat are going to try this electoral catastrophe for their socialist policies go away. The upstate victory last Spring after a GOP moron showed his six-pack abs in the mirror for admiration on Craigslist was of a mediocre GOP female by a highly-funded and supported Demonrat RICO conspiracy. This GOP victory in the heart of the Bolshevik archipelago is something else.

My guess is that deaf, dumb and blind kid [or shall we say man-child?] in the Oval Office won't even acknowledge that he is swirling slowly downward in the porcelain bowl towards his true cloacal home---the sewer of community organizing and agitpreppie BS which spawned him in the first place!
UPDATE
Debbie Wasserman-Schmuck and the compulsive motor-mouth Upchuck Shumer, now a US Senator, will have a difficult time explaining how Shumer's old CD where he served as a Congressman [when I met and talked with him---or rather he bragged at me that he was the first Jew on Harvard's basketball team---at a Sag Harbor cocktail confab with Betty Friedan, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. & a bunch of other "social elite" stroking each other's egos]. By coincidence, this seat has not been GOP since 1920 and was also the springboard for Geraldine Ferraro's career. I just can't wait to hear the agitpreppies try to spin this catastrophe into some sort of Demonrat victory....!!!

ft's Wolfgang Munchau on Bad Times ahead for Eurozone

2011-09-13T00:31:00.002-04:00

FT's Munchau and Martin Wolf are two of the best FT writers. Here's the two opening paras on WM's take on the near future:

The two real options for a resolution of the eurozone crisis came into full conflict last week. The first is a common eurozone bond. The second is a monetisation of national debt through the European Central Bank. Angela Merkel rejects the former. Europe’s central bankers reject the latter. Jürgen Stark, a member of the European Central Bank’s executive board, rejects both, and last week resigned in protest. Along with other conservative economists, he is advocating a third way, adjustment through depression – the simultaneous deleveraging of the private and public sector debt.
As an advocate of eurozone bonds, I have to admit their prospect looks grim after last week’s ruling of the German constitutional court. The court upheld the European financial adjustment facility, the crisis mechanism. This was, undoubtedly, good news. But after I read the whole ruling, which ran to 29 tightly written pages, I realised that this judgement was not a victory for the eurozone at all. On the contrary, it categorically rules out any policy option beyond what has been agreed so far. I cannot see how it can be consistent with the survival of the eurozone, given the policies of member states and the ECB.

Bismarck famously pronounced that "God has a special providence for drunks, idiots, children and the United States of America." Once again, no matter how badly things go in our own land of the free, the land Euroweenies despise and Muslims in Grovesnor Square hate BECAUSE of our democratic freedoms, we are lucking out, even if it is through Bernanke's sneaky "quantitative easing."

The FT is a beast on copyright infringement, so read the rest of the article and find out why Europe has EVEN harder times ahead than the USA. The good news, the USA might be able to slough off the -power-drunk idiot man-child now living in the White House. Ain't it great that God's "SPECIAL PROVIDENCE" Bismarck spoke of prioritizes the USA before drunks, idiots and children?

Obama Value Meal: You order a couple of burgers & fries & drinks---The guy behind you pays for it!

2011-09-12T11:28:00.002-04:00

Michael Barone expands a bit on the Conan O'Brien joke in the headline:

What is there to say about Barack Obama's speech to Congress Thursday night and the so-called American Jobs Act he said Congress must pass? Several thoughts occur, all starting with P.

Projection. That's psychologist-speak term for projecting your own faults on others. "This isn't political grandstanding," Obama told members of Congress, as Republicans snickered (but thankfully resisted the temptation to shout, "You lie!"). "This isn't class warfare."

These sentences came four paragraphs after Obama insisted that "the most affluent citizens and corporations" should pay more taxes (which spurs job creation how?) and not long before he promised to "take that message to every corner of the country."

Lest there be any doubt about Obama's real intentions, consider that his speech was obviously modeled on Harry Truman's call for a special session of the Republican Congress in the summer of 1948 so he could campaign against it. And consider that Obama pointedly refused to rebuke Jim Hoffa's "let's take these sons of bitches out" -- meaning Republicans -- when he introduced him last Monday in Detroit.

Pragmatism. Perceptive writers like David Brooks of the New York Times told us in 2008 that Obama was basically a pragmatist, a slave to no ideology but simply a student of what works. Brooks was apparently impressed by Obama's mention of Edmund Burke and the sharp crease in his pants.

But a pragmatist would probably not choose to call for more of the policies that plainly haven't worked. Infrastructure spending (shovel ready, anyone?), subsidies of teachers' salaries, fixing roofs and windows on schools: These were all in the 2009 stimulus package, which has led to the stagnant economy we have today.

A pragmatist doesn't keep pressing the same garage door button when the garage door doesn't open. He gets out of the car and tries to identify what's wrong.

Paid for. "Everything in this bill," Obama said in his eighth paragraph, "will be paid for. Everything."

By whom? Well, in the 24th paragraph he tells us that he is asking the 12-member supercommittee Congress set up under the debt ceiling bill to add another $450,000,000,000 or so to the $1,500,000,000,000 in savings it is charged to come up with. The roving camera showed the ordinarily hardy supercommittee member Sen. Jon Kyl looking queasy.

Obama is like the guy in the bar who says, "I'll stand drinks for everyone in the house," and then adds, "Those guys over there are going to pay for them."

What's fascinating here is that once again the supposedly pragmatic and sometimes professorial president is not making use of the first class professionals in the Office of Management and Budget to come up with specifics, but is leaving that to members of Congress, maybe in a midnight marathon session with deadlines pending. Same as on the stimulus package and Obamacare.

Pathetic promises. Perhaps he hoped people wouldn't notice, but Obama did put in two words -- "faster trains" -- as a plug for his pet project of high-speed rail. Liberal blogger Kevin Drum calls California's HSR project, the largest in the nation, "a fantastic boondoggle," likely to cost three or four times estimates and with ridership estimates that are "fantasies." "We have way better uses for this dough," Drum concludes.

Political payoffs. Nearly one-quarter of this latest stimulus package -- sorry, American Jobs Act -- is aid to state and local government, to keep teachers and other public employee union members on the job and paying dues to the unions. Altogether unions gave Democrats some $400 million in the 2008 election cycle. Pretty good return on their "investment," eh?

Pettifoggery. Obama impressed many conservative writers in 2008 with his ability to state their positions in fair terms -- which led some to think that surely he must agree with them. But he seems to have lost this knack.

Conservatives, according to this speech, want to "wipe out the basic protections that Americans have counted on for decades" and "simply cut most government spending and eliminate most government regulations."

"Most" means more than 50 percent. Does the White House have documentation for the claim that Republicans want to cut government spending by more than 50 percent? And what "basic protections" do they want to "wipe out"?

Obama seemed like an unhappy warrior Thursday night, still unreconciled to the results of the 2010 elections, "seeming desperate and condescending at the same time," in the words of maverick liberal blogger Mickey Kaus. That darn garage door just won't open!

Mark Steyn on The Post-Postmodern 9/11 Contextualization Frenzy

2011-09-11T08:37:00.002-04:00

Mark was born in Belgium and that alone explains how he understands a post-postmodern mentality. In the Nati0onal Review, he shows how living in Australia, then Canada, and finally New Hampshire has given him the most "diverse" POV possible. The whole article is rife with the insanity promulgated by NPR, PBS, "artistes" and bien-pensant victims of their own chronic serial brainfarts. Here is a small sample, but read the entire piece entitled "Let's Roll Over":

We retreat to equivocation, cultural self-loathing, and utterly fraudulent misrepresentation of 9/11.

Waiting to be interviewed on the radio the other day, I found myself on hold listening to a public-service message exhorting listeners to go to 911day.org and tell their fellow citizens how they would be observing the tenth anniversary of the, ah, “tragic events.” There followed a sound bite of a lady explaining that she would be paying tribute by going and cleaning up an area of the beach.

Great! Who could object to that? Anything else? Well, another lady pledged that she “will continue to discuss anti-bullying tactics with my grandson.”

Marvelous. Because studies show that many middle-school bullies graduate to hijacking passenger jets and flying them into tall buildings?
Whoa, ease up on the old judgmentalism there, pal. In New Jersey, many of whose residents were among the dead, middle-schoolers will mark the anniversary with a special 9/11 curriculum that will “analyze diversity and prejudice in U.S. history.” And, if the “9/11 Peace Story Quilt” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art teaches us anything, it’s that the “tragic events” only underline the “importance of respect.” And “understanding.” As one of the quilt panels puts it:

You should never feel left out

You are a piece of a puzzle

And without you

The whole picture can’t be seen
.

And if that message of “healing and unity” doesn’t sum up what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, what does? A painting of a plane flying into a building? A sculpture of bodies falling from a skyscraper? Oh, don’t be so drearily literal. “It is still too soon,” says Midori Yashimoto, director of the New Jersey City University Visual Arts Gallery, whose exhibition “Afterwards & Forward” is intended to “promote dialogue, deeper reflection, meditation, and contextualization.” So, instead of planes and skyscrapers, it has Yoko Ono’s “Wish Tree,” on which you can hang little tags with your ideas for world peace.

Mark sets us up for a condemnation of the nanny or is it ninny who masquerades in a transvestite mode as Mayor of NYC. The egregious Bloomberg has made the ultimate fool of himself, though you won't know that by listening to girly-men like Fareed Zakaria and even that doughty isolationist Pat Buchanan, who really don't know what IS missing from the ten-year anniversary:

What’s missing from these commemorations?
Firemen?

Oh, please. There are some pieces of the puzzle we have to leave out. As Mayor Bloomberg’s office has patiently explained, there’s “not enough room” at the official Ground Zero commemoration to accommodate any firemen. “Which is kind of weird,” wrote the Canadian blogger Kathy Shaidle, “since 343 of them managed to fit into the exact same space ten years ago.” On a day when all the fancypants money-no-object federal acronyms comprehensively failed — CIA, FBI, FAA, INS — the only bit of government that worked was the low-level unglamorous municipal government represented by the Fire Department of New York. When they arrived at the World Trade Center the air was thick with falling bodies — ordinary men and women trapped on high floors above where the planes had hit, who chose to spend their last seconds in one last gulp of open air rather than die in an inferno of jet fuel. Far “too soon” for any of that at New Jersey City University, but perhaps you could reenact the moment by filling out a peace tag for Yoko Ono’s “Wish Tree” and then letting it flutter to the ground.

Upon arrival at the foot of the towers, two firemen were hit by falling bodies. “There is no other way to put it,” one of their colleagues explained. “They exploded.”

Any room for that on the Metropolitan Museum’s “Peace Quilt”? Sadly not. We’re all out of squares.

What else is missing from these commemorations?

“Let’s Roll”?

This quote is from a Mr. Beamer who led the charge to the cockpit of Flight 93 to prevent the aircraft from crashing into either the US Capitol Bldg or the White House, and demonstrated that America still has REAL MALE GONADS among the sissified old biddies teaching their grandchildren anti-bullying happy horseshit. Mark answers his own question with the irony that is the only reaction to the vapid silliness that the NPRs of the Anglo-Saxon world are subsidized by cowards and LGBTs to propagate.

What’s that — a quilting technique?

No, what’s missing from these commemorations is more Muslims. The other day I bumped into an old BBC pal who’s flying in for the anniversary to file a dispatch on why you see fewer women on the streets of New York wearing niqabs and burqas than you do on the streets of London. She thought this was a telling indictment of the post-9/11 climate of “Islamophobia.” I pointed out that, due to basic differences in immigration sources, there are far fewer Muslims in New York than in London. It would be like me flying into Stratford-on-Avon and reporting on the lack of Hispanics. But the suits had already approved the trip, so she was in no mood to call it off.

Of course, anyone who follows the BBC, which has completely morphed since I used to listen to it broadcasting from Cyprus forty years ago when I lived in Beirut. Back then, it was the only voice of sanity in a region full of whack-jobs. Now the BBC has morphed into a menagerie of moronic mindlessness---suitable for a nation like the UK which cannot stop Muslims from rioting and taking over whole parts of the capitol city of London, which mindless pussy-behavior will probably NOT prevent Old London Towne from being viciously attacked by Islamic goons, thugs and murderous morons much like America is being attacked by SEIU foreign-born union members attacking REAL Americans for standing by their constitutional rights.

Here are some more examples of the arrant stupidity of people in Canada, Australia [the Land of Oz is full of flying monkeys, mostly sitting on court benches as judges], and other "allies" who fear being mean to Muslims:

How are America’s allies remembering the real victims of 9/11? “Muslim Canucks Deal with Stereotypes Ten Years After 9/11,” reports CTV in Canada. And it’s a short step from stereotyping to criminalizing. “How the Fear of Being Criminalized Has Forced Muslims into Silence,” reports the Guardian in Britain. In Australia, a Muslim terrorism suspect was so fearful of being criminalized and stereotyped in the post-9/11 epidemic of paranoia that he pulled a Browning pistol out of his pants and hit Sgt. Adam Wolsey of the Sydney constabulary. Fortunately, Judge Leonie Flannery acquitted him of shooting with intent to harm on the grounds that “‘anti-Muslim sentiment’ made him fear for his safety,” as Sydney’s Daily Telegraph reported on Friday. That’s such a heartwarming story for this 9/11 anniversary they should add an extra panel to the peace quilt, perhaps showing a terror suspect opening fire on a judge as she’s pronouncing him not guilty and then shrugging off the light shoulder wound as a useful exercise in healing and unity.

Judge Flannery might just be another Irish drunk [I'm Irish, so I know the type] whose judgment has been fatally impaired by all sorts of liquid or pharmaceutical swallowings. But let's get back to real heroes [Todd Beamer] and really craven cowardly half-witted imbeciles [Mayor Bloomberg]:

What of the 23rd Psalm? It was recited by Flight 93 passenger Todd Beamer and the telephone operator Lisa Jefferson in the final moments of his life before he cried, “Let’s roll!” and rushed the hijackers.
No, sorry. Aside from firemen, Mayor Bloomberg’s official commemoration hasn’t got any room for clergy, either, what with all the Executive Deputy Assistant Directors of Healing and Outreach who’ll be there. One reason why there’s so little room at Ground Zero is because it’s still a building site. As I write in my new book, 9/11 was something America’s enemies did to us; the ten-year hole is something we did to ourselves — and in its way, the interminable bureaucratic sloth is surely as eloquent as anything Nanny Bloomberg will say in his remarks.

In Shanksville, Pa., the zoning and permitting processes are presumably less arthritic than in Lower Manhattan, but the Flight 93 memorial has still not been completed. There were objections to the proposed “Crescent of Embrace” on the grounds that it looked like an Islamic crescent pointing towards Mecca. The defense of its designers was that, au contraire, it’s just the usual touchy-feely huggy-weepy pansy-wimpy multiculti effete healing diversity mush. It doesn’t really matter which of these interpretations is correct, since neither of them has anything to do with what the passengers of Flight 93 actually did a decade ago. 9/11 was both Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid rolled into one, and the fourth flight was the only good news of the day, when citizen volunteers formed themselves into an ad hoc militia and denied Osama bin Laden what might have been his most spectacular victory. A few brave individuals figured out what was going on and pushed back within half an hour. But we can’t memorialize their sacrifice within a decade. And when the architect gets the memorial brief, he naturally assumes that there’s been a typing error and that “Let’s roll!” should really be “Let’s roll over!”

Sometimes it takes a foreigner to judge a culture best---the guy from Belgium/Australia/'Canada can now sit in N.H. and see us for what we have become---a nation with an armed forces that refuses to admit that a Major Mohammed in Fort Bliss wasn't an Islamic firebrand, but only felt left out because nobody, like Priya's pitiful Indian brother on The Big Bang Theory, would date this pitiful pile of stinking moral toxic sewage. Mark Steyn is the antidote to stinking piles of toxic waste like Fareed Zakaria or Chriastiane Amanpour, who hate America because it is great and strong and they come from cultures full of moral lepers......
Mark ends up with a coda castigating the bureaucratic lassitude and litigious lunacy that makes America into a dying flame, despite the Todd Beamers and millions of REAL AMERICANS in this country worthy of our respect. Mark talks some final smack about the pussy-brained fraudulent public office-holders who shrink from representing America as the most dynamic and influential culture in the last two-hundred years----no matter what Euroweenies have been whining about endlessly in their feminized loo-zer mentality:

And so we commemorate an act of war as a “tragic event,” and we retreat to equivocation, cultural self-loathing, and utterly fraudulent misrepresentation about the events of the day. In the weeks after 9/11, Americans were enjoined to ask, “Why do they hate us?” A better question is: “Why do they despise us?” And the quickest way to figure out the answer is to visit the Peace Quilt and the Wish Tree, the Crescent of Embrace and the Hole of Bureaucratic Inertia.

Ayman al-Zawahri Ordered Attacks Against USA On 9/11 Anniversary To Avenge Bin Laden

2011-09-11T03:28:00.001-04:00

This twisted psychotic actually trained as a medical doctor until he switched in mid-life from saving lives to taking them---as many as possible. Dr. Al-Zawahiri is actually a sort of proactive Dr. Kevorkian and represents a very large swathe of what in the Muslim world passes for "poltical thinking." I'm hoping one of our drones can find this specimen of updated-SS Hauptfuhrer and send him to the flames of his final destination with no detour toward 72 Virgins or any other stop on his downward spiral into eternal torment.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Packer/Saints Game Biggest Primetime NFL TV Game since Last Century!!!

2011-09-10T08:28:00.003-04:00

The Hollywood Reporter demonstrated afain the popularity of pro football in the Americaqn pantheon of pastimes.

Over 25 million Americns watched the game & Thursday nite, 18 million watched the musical inauguration of the season.

Attempts by the statist mafiosi to hamper and hamstring the game are doomed, as are other elements of their feminizing agenda.

This February's Super Bowl drew 120 million viewers, most EVER for any TV broadcast about anything===and 165 million reportedly stayed watching to boost the Super Bowl Packer victory as THE MOST WATCHED EVENT LIVE IN US TV HISTORY......!!!!!!l
UPDATE TV by the Numbers has the latest stats [27.2 million viewers] & it appears the NFL is getting more popular every year.

Interesting contrast: O'Bozo had around 31 million libtards watching this moronic finger-wagging dunce yelling "pass this bill now...." while White House aides admitted that the bill in its final form won't be ready to pass for at least a week or maybe more.

I don't know whether the Keystone Kops or the Three Stooges would even accept a dunce as dumb as Obungler if he can keep repeating he wants the bill passed "now" when it'll take another week to lick into shape.

Sorta reminds you of the Botox Queen telling us peons that "you'll know what's in the bill after we pass it."

Remember when O'Bozo promised to have the most "transparent" administration in US history? I guess that meant that you can look in one of those oversized ears and see daylight right through on the other side...!

Thirty-one million on eleven cable and network channels versus 27.2 on NBC all by itself. Kinda tells everybody except the hopeless libtards just how credible the First Dunce is in the eyes of the American people.

Judith Miller on the NYPD's Counterterrorism Successes

2011-09-10T07:12:00.002-04:00

Judith Miller is a very strange and brilliant reporter whom I have met several times, always overseas and during the period when she was the chief NYT reporter/analyst for the Middle East. I even met her parents whom she was dining with during the World Economic Forum's meeting in Casablanca in 1995. Her book God Has Ninety-Nine Names: Reporting from a Militant Middle East is a useful tour d'horizon of the region in the mid-'90s. Her famous "free speech" jailing brought her front and center to the nation's headlines over the infamous scapgegoating of Scooter Libby, whose arrest and conviction on a technicalities remain blots on the history of American law enforcement.

In today's edition of the Wall Street Journal, her wonderful analysis of the NYPD's record as the nation's premier counterintelligence organization, better than the factionalized FBI & CIA whose internecine strife has almost paralyzed their cooperation in protecting the country at home & abroad ever since the treasonous Jamie Gorelick instituted the infamous "Chinese Firewall" to hamper America's international efforts to combat and prevent terrorist acts at home & abroad;
A useful book to read in conjunction with the NYPD's efforts is Andy McCarthy's The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, a top federal prosecutor up until 2003 whose encyclopedic knowledge of the Mephisophelian transaction between the statists and Islamists undertaking a civilizational war on the US Constitution and our entire concept of the liberties enshrined in The Bill of Rights:

A specter has haunted the New York Police Department during this week's torrent of 10th anniversary commemorations of 9/11—the 13 terrorist plots against the city in the past decade that have failed or been thwarted thanks partly to NYPD counterterrorism efforts.

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and his 50,000-strong department know that the 9/11 gatherings are an occasion not only to reflect on that terrible day. They're also a prime target for al Qaeda and other Islamist extremists who long to convince the world, and perhaps themselves, that they're still capable of killing in the name of their perverse interpretation of Islam.

Commissioner Kelly allocates some $330 million of his $4.6 billion annual budget and 1,200 of his staff to counterterrorism. He and his staff, not surprisingly, spent the week bolstering security at the remembrance gatherings throughout the city. On Wednesday, he came to the Manhattan Institute to tout the NYPD's counterterrorism record and defend his department against press allegations that his intelligence division has been spying illegally on Muslims and infringing on their privacy and civil rights.

The Muslim Brotherhood's political and legal adjunct in the US, CAIR. has influence far beyond its limited membership. The old Comintern Left conspiracy against the USA & its national interests has now shifted loyalties to the Ikhwan or Muslim Brotherhood founded by Hassan al-Banna in the twenties along the lines of Jabotinsky's Likud and Mussolini's Fascists and Hitler's National Socialists. Hamas is the most "successful" of these organizations founded as offshoots of Al-Banna's Ikhwan, but CAIR is another group of fellow travellers in this seedy crowd. Judith Miller elaborates:

The police have to factor terrorism into "everything we do," Mr. Kelly said. If that means following leads that take NYPD undercover detectives into mosques, Islamic bookstores, Muslim student associations, cafes and nightclubs, so be it. Mr. Kelly vowed to continue stationing liaisons in 11 cities abroad to "ask the New York question"—much to the occasional chagrin of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the CIA.

It was an undercover officer in an Islamic bookstore who helped stop Shahawar Matin Siraj, a homegrown Muslim extremist and self-professed al Qaeda admirer, from bombing the Herald Square subway station during the 2004 Republican convention, Mr. Kelly said. Another undercover officer prevented homegrown terrorists Ahmed Ferhani, 26, and Mohamed Mamdouh, 20, from bombing a Manhattan synagogue and trying to "take out the entire building."

Would he continue sending NYPD officers across the Hudson into deepest, darkest New Jersey? Yes, he declared, if that was what was needed to keep tabs on the likes of Carlos Almonte and Mohammed Alessa—al Qaeda sympathizers arrested en route to Somalia at JFK Airport in 2010 "who were determined to receive terrorist training abroad only to return home to kill us here."

Michael Sheehan, a former NYPD deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, says that the NYPD has succeeded thanks to its collection and sharing of domestic and foreign intelligence through "humint" (human sources) and "sigint" (signals intelligence) such as electronic intercepts and the monitoring of Internet, cellphone and other communications. Tip-offs from concerned family or community members have also been vital.

The successes of the NYPD often fly under the radar of the sensationalist tabloids, or are forgotten after a day of blaring publicity which is the diverted to the NEXT BIG THING in our society of "divertissements." A singular success in NYPD's Sigint was the 2006 "Liquid Bomb Plot":

Sigint was key in disrupting at least two of the most serious al Qaeda plots targeting New York since 9/11: the 2006 "Liquid Bomb Plot," or "Operation Overt," in which 25 British citizens of Pakistani descent targeted some seven transatlantic commercial flights from London to North America; and Operation Highrise, an attempt to use suicide bombers to blow up New York City subways in 2009.

The homegrown Islamist in that plot was Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan immigrant with al Qaeda ties who grew up in New York City and staged his operation from there and Colorado. In Zazi's case, investigators say, officials were initially tipped off by the intercept of an email he sent from Colorado to an address in Pakistan that was associated with another group of terrorists who had been arrested earlier that year in Manchester, England.

The "link man," or coordinator in Pakistan, writes Mitchell D. Silber, director of Intelligence Analysis for the New York Police Department, in his forthcoming book, "The Al Qaeda Factor," was corresponding with operatives in three different al Qaeda plots. Zazi's New York subway plot took off only after he contacted the coordinator, identified only as "Ahmad," and informed him that the "wedding," or suicide operation, "was ready to proceed," writes Mr. Silber.

Miller lists more successes by Internet intercepts:

Another serious plot that was disrupted thanks to Internet intercepts was a 2006 scheme by Assem Hammoud, a 31-year-old Lebanese al Qaeda member, and several other still unnamed Islamists—all overseas—to flood Lower Manhattan by setting off explosives in the PATH railway tunnels under the Hudson River. While no arrests in America were made, several suspects have been detained in Lebanon and other Arab states.

Mr. Silber argues that humint has proven even more valuable than sigint in detecting and thwarting homegrown threats—the fastest-growing category of militant Islamist terror. This explains Mr. Kelly's determination to preserve the NYPD's vast intelligence capabilities, even if he's forced to scale back elsewhere in the department due to budget cuts.

With Osama bin Laden dead and al Qaeda under pressure, some terrorism experts argue, as does Peter Bergen, author of the book "The Longest War," that al Qaeda, or at least its "core," "no longer poses a national security threat" to America "that could result in a mass-casualty attack anywhere close to the scale of 9/11."

Mr. Kelly isn't buying it. He's fixated on the recent jump in homegrown extremist plots throughout the country—to 10 in 2009 and 12 in 2010 from four in 2007 and just one in 2005. The increase, says John Miller, a former deputy director for analysis for the Director of National Intelligence, is most likely due to the influence of Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American cleric now hiding in Yemen whose stirring Internet sermons have inspired many of the would-be jihadis detained in recent plots.

Mr. Kelly also knows that in too many cases, New York has been lucky. Faisal Shazad, a middle-class Pakistani–American resident of Connecticut, failed last year to detonate a bomb in Times Square only because he received too little training in Pakistan.

Mr. Kelly calls the killing of bin Laden "success with complications." Those include the numerous references to New York found in his documents in Abbottabad, all of which suggest that bin Laden never abandoned his dream of striking the city again. The discovery on Thursday night of a specific and "credible" al Qaeda linked plot tied to the 9/11 commemorations suggests that Mr. Kelly's concern is justified.

Vigilance by the NYPD and thoughtful and alert political actors like Raymond Kelly are necessary to continue the combination of luck [the Pakistani schmuck was caught in a First Class seat moments before takeoff when his Times Square SUV failed to explode on cue] and applied skill sets hard-won in the fight on terror over the last several decades are required to head off Awlaki in Sana'a and the Fifth Column outlined by Andy McCarthy in The Grand Jihad.

Detroit and St. Louis Numbers One & Two in Crime

2011-09-08T06:23:00.002-04:00

1964-1965 were the two years I lived in St. Louis and had the opportunity to work in the old Pruitt-Igoe complex of public high-rise housing for a Demonrat black "insurgent" congressional candidate whose son still holds the seat and is among the most corrupt members of the Black Caucus, itself the most corrupt segment of the Demonrat Party of Corruption currently raping our economy and poised to do so again under a totally inept affirmative-action schoolboy.

Detroit was my homebase in the later sixties when I lived in Ann Arbor and went there often---to see Lucien Nedzi, a Congressman whose name I actually want to repeat because he had a minimum of moral fiber in his political stature---I went to the Old Palladium when it was still safe to do so and saw Van Morrison and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, among many memories. I even met Bill Ayers and his soon-to-be-dead girl friend Diana Oughton at Detroit Airport when Mark Rudd, recently on the cover of Time Magazine for leading a student "insurrection" at Columbia U., where the current affirmative-action POTUS went to school and where his GPA and senior thesis have "disappeared," without a peep from the lamestream MSM, afraid to be called "racist." Rick Perry released his grades from Texas A&M, and immediately met with a wall of ridicule from the lamestreamers----who would never dare to ask for Obungler's transcripts. Even his Harvard Law Review Election was another exercise in affirmative action, as the Clown-in-Chief never wrote anything and the role of "President" is simply a popularity contest---he couldn't even write his own autobiography, Dreams of My Father, without asking serial bungler Bill Ayers, who killed his own girlfriend back in 1970 with faulty bomb-making instructions and blew up a Greenwich Village townhouse in the process, to do the heavy lifting.

When Obama talks about "fixing" Detroit, he means throwing more taxpayer or quantitative easing money at the problem, which might ensure his political popularity and buy off a few more corrupt public officials and union goons, but ain't gonna "fix" anything---a momentary fix like one from a heroin needle.

Hoffa describes the combatants in his "war" as "workers" on the one hand and "the Tea Party" on the other. But of course he isn't interested in workers in general, only those who belong to unions--a group that, after decades of private-sector union decline, largely consists of employees of government, government contractors and government bailout beneficiaries such as General Motors and Chrysler. "The Tea Party," meanwhile, is a dysphemism for taxpayers.

"Despite President Obama's repeated claims to change the tone in Washington, the White House had no comment this afternoon" on Hoffa's highly uncivil rhetoric, ABC News reports. Hey, give Hoffa credit. It isn't easy to stop this president from talking.

In his own speech, the president made clear that he agreed with the substance if not the tone of Hoffa's remarks. But turning America into Detroit may not be easy. After all, once Detroiters moved past Eight Mile Road, they were no longer able to vote against Coleman Young. Obama can't shrink the electorate he will have to face next year.

The Republic of the United States of America is still based on voting for its president, and all the corrupt union thugs and goons and feckless POTUS BS isn't going to change that fact.

If the most recent polls are any indication, the presidency is the GOP's to win in 2012, despite every effort from a corrupt biased media led by the flagship of moral sewage, NBC and its ridiculous agitprop outlet mall, PMSNBC.

Fouad Ajami in the Decade from 9/11/01 Until Today

2011-09-08T05:16:00.002-04:00

Fouad Ajami became my friend soon after he moved to teach at SAIS in DC in 1980 and stayed as a houseguest in my condo in DuPont Circle for two weeks while reading the Raj Trilogy & Sigmund Freud's basic works. After my marriage made my condo available, he moved in as my reduced-rent houseguest full-time, while dating the female sec'y of the Saudi Ambassador---making this article in today's WSJ doubly interesting to me, as I had given him some contacts in Jeddah where I'd lived for three years myself. [Ed's note: while I was his landlord, he was almost invariably late with the rent check, making him a true representative of the Arab world....!]

The Arabic word shamata has its own power. The closest approximation to it is the German schadenfreude—glee at another's misfortune. And when the Twin Towers fell 10 years ago this week, there was plenty of glee in Arab lands—a sense of wonder, bordering on pride, that a band of young Arabs had brought soot and ruin onto American soil.

The symbols of this mighty American republic—the commercial empire in New York, the military power embodied by the Pentagon—had been hit. Sweets were handed out in East Jerusalem, there were no tears shed in Cairo for the Americans, more than three decades of U.S. aid notwithstanding. Everywhere in that Arab world—among the Western-educated elite as among the Islamists—there was unmistakable satisfaction that the Americans had gotten their comeuppance.

There were sympathetic vigils in Iran—America's most determined enemy in the region—and anti-American belligerence in the Arab countries most closely allied with the United States. This occasioned the observation of the noted historian Bernard Lewis that there were pro-American regimes with anti-American populations, and anti-American regimes with pro-American populations.

I traveled to Jeddah and Cairo in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. In the splendid homes of wealthy American-educated businessmen, in the salons of perfectly polished men and women of letters, there was no small measure of admiration for Osama bin Laden. He was the avenger, the Arabs had been at the receiving end of Western power, and now the scales were righted. "Yes, but . . . ," said the Arab intellectual class, almost in unison. Those death pilots may have been zealous, but now the Americans know, and for the first time, what it means to be at the receiving end of power.

Very few Arabs believed that the landscape all around them—the tyrannical states, the growing poverty, the destruction of what little grace their old cities once possessed, the war across the generations between secular fathers and Islamist children—was the harvest of their own history. It was easier to believe that the Americans had willed those outcomes.

The two paragraph's emphasized above epitomize the plight of the Arab and the Muslims in the region. Last night, a second-rate libtard named Robin Wright was on Jon Stewart's Daily Show reciting the usual lying mantras of the Hollyweird/Academicide/Demonrat catechism of how and why the 9/11 debacle was somehow America's fault. The second paragraph emphasized above in bold is the typical whinging of second- and third-rate powers and of people who prefer hanging onto their victimhood. The Japanese and Chinese and S. Koreans have largely avoided this. They are First Class cultures that abhor the fingerpointing and female "it's his fault" blame culture of the very underdeveloped Arab and Muslim state of mind. Only the Arab world has had THREE [3] UN-sponsored Special Studies, the last two by Arab economists, intellectuals, and businesspeople themselves that have condemned the backwardness of Arab dictators. And the easy and lazy Arab conclusion always seems to be that, because the Americans work with Arab strongmen and Iranian Shahs in order to facilitate access to America's energy appetite, we are therefore totally and completely responsible for their plight.

Arabs and other Muslims [though not so much the Iranians] appear all too ready to blame America, the French, the British, anyone but themselves for the fact that they are a second-rate culture and a third-rate economic power, based on rentier income and persistent lapses in moral and ethical probity on any and all important issues concerning their own fate and destiny---to borrow another German word with resonant meaning, Shicksal. Fouad hesitates to use the word craven cowardice, but the patriarchal braggadocio of Arab males couldn't accept that in the last thousand years, they had only conquered their own women---the Turks had largely done the fighting and the leading in the Second Millenium for the so-called caliphate. Ajami proceeds to fill in the blanks:

In truth, in the decade prior to 9/11, America had paid the Arab world scant attention. We had taken a holiday from history's exertions. But the Arabs had hung onto their belief that a willful America disposed of their fate. The Arab regimes possessed their own sources of power—fearsome security apparatuses, money in the oil states, official custodians of religion who gave repression their seal of approval.

But it was more convenient to trace the trail across the ocean, to the United States. Mohammed Atta, who led the death pilots, was a child of the Egyptian middle class, a lawyer's son, formed by the disappointments of Egypt and its inequities. But there was little of him said in Egypt. The official press looked away.

There was to be no way of getting politically conscious Arabs to accept responsibility for what had taken place on 9/11. Set aside those steeped in conspiracy who thought that these attacks were the work of Americans themselves, that thousands of Jews had not shown up at work in the Twin Towers on 9/11. The pathology that mattered was that of otherwise reasonable men and women who were glad for America's torment. The Americans had might, but were far away. Now the terrorism, like a magnet, drew them into Arab and Muslim lands. Now they were near, and they would be entangled in the great civil war raging over the course of Arab and Muslim history.

The masters and preachers of terror had told their foot soldiers, and the great mass on the fence, that the Americans would make a run for it—as they had in Lebanon and Somalia, that they didn't have the stomach for a fight. The Arabs barely took notice when America struck the Taliban in Kabul. What was Afghanistan to them? It was a blighted and miserable land at a safe distance.

But when Cobra II rolled into Baghdad after only desultory resistance and less than a month's fighting, the Arabs had to resort, with their Western enablers like Robin Wright and a thousand other lamestream MSMers, Hollyweirdos, Academicide nobodies, and corrupt Demonrat pols, to the old games of "stab in the back." The WMD had been destroyed or shipped to Syria by the paranoid monster Saddam before the war over a period of a couple of years and George Tenet's "slam dunk" was ridiculed by the castrati and crone-hives of the institutional surrender apparatus of the American left. The basic lack of backbone and moral probity at the heart of Arab politics surfaced with a third-rate mediocrity in the Iraqi Al-Maliki and had Petraeus and GWB not done the Surge in '06, the Demonrats would have inflicted another self-administered defeat on the US military---which seems to be their long-term goal: The fact that a hateful demon like Saddam could symbolize much that the Arabs admired in themselves says more than anything else about the backwardness of that part of the world.

....the American war, and the sense of righteous violation, soon hit the Arab world itself. Saddam Hussein may not have been the Arab idol he was a decade earlier, but he was still a favored son of that Arab nation, its self-appointed defender. The toppling of his regime, some 18 months or so after 9/11, had brought the war closer to the Arabs. The spectacle of the Iraqi despot flushed out of his spider hole by American soldiers was a lesson to the Arabs as to the falseness and futility of radicalism.

It is said that "the east" is a land given to long memory, that there the past is never forgotten. But a decade on, the Arab world has little to say about 9/11—at least not directly. In the course of that Arab Spring, young people in Tunisia and Egypt brought down the dreaded dictators. And in Libya, there is the thrill of liberty, delivered, in part, by Western powers. In the slaughter-grounds of Syria, the rage is not directed against foreign demons, but against the cruel rulers who have robbed that population of a chance at a decent life.

America held the line in the aftermath of 9/11. It wasn't brilliant at everything it attempted in Arab lands. But a chance was given the Arabs to come face to face, and truly for the first time, with the harvest of their own history. Now their world is what they make of it.

Indeed, though it has taken a decade to shake off the silly tropes the Arabs loved to repeat about "violation" by the Americans, when they themselves had a dictator in Saddam who had his own rape rooms to sodomize the wives of citizens who wished to meet their strongman in a family setting---just one example of the total loo-zer status of this culture---the feckless Palestinians are now once again begging for nationhood status after doing little to earn it on its own. Even though the West Bank Palestinians are willing to turn over an Israeli soldier held hostage---typical Arab perfidy and cowardice in action by their HAMAS brothers supported by CAIR, their treasonous Fifth Column now working "legally" in the USA to undermine any sense of Palestinian self-respect---the USA should not and must not blindly support Palestinian membership in the UN as long as they violate every tenet of human rights and civilized behavior by continuing to hold a relatively innocent Israeli soldier hostage.

I doubt this temporizing victim of leftist doctrine in our White House can rise to the occasion and demand that Israel at least get back its Corporal Shalit before giving the murderous thugs in Gaza any membership among nations that practice a bare minimum of humanitarian fairness and don't persist in self-defeating narratives of national suicide. Leave that to the North Koreans and take at least one tiny step to demonstrate that you are not all the cowardly loo-zers that history has shown you to be----with occasional exceptions under the right circumstances---ever since the end of the Abbasid Caliphate moved its capital to Iraq and then was destroyed by the Mongol Horde of Helagu in 1258.

Try pulling yourselves up by your socks and not simply succumb to cutting corners and fingerpointing---that will only keep the rest of the world's secret opinion that the Arab's are constitutionally unable to run any kind of democratic and representative society which takes into account the role of its own heterodox minorities such as Coptic & Greek Christians and Druzi and Alevis and several in Pakistan and other heterodoxies such as Shi'ism. Perhaps following a path such as the great subcontinental experiment of India is attempting to do so could serve as a move in the right direction.

Cosmic Rays Vie With Sunspots as Extraterrestrial Climate Changers

2011-09-08T01:08:00.002-04:00

CERN is a huge European equivalent [actually larger than] the huge FermiLab & Brookhaven & CalTech science centers which do cutting edge research on stuff as varied as the Higgs Boson, the invention by a British research scientist of html, and now, using the largest electron accelerator in the world, looking for the effect of cosmic rays and solar wind on long-term climate changes on Planet Earth.

Don't look to Al Gore, who is making millions in his financial stake in "carbon credits," a fiscal hoax that may rival Bernie Madoff in its Ponzi possibilities. He's gonna stick with man-made climate change no matter what the science says, since this D+ science student [his only grade at Vanderbilt on the subject in his very stilted college career]. It should be noted that he was going to Divinity School at the time since he was unable to complete his undergrad studies at Harvard due to mental illness [as well as clinical stupidity]. No law school would accept him even though his Senator daddy tried hard to get him in.

I've written often in this blog about the effect of the long-term sunspot cycle and the Middle Age Warming period, attested by historical sources across Europe from about 1000-1500 AD and the subsequent Little Ice Age [circa 1645-1715AD]. The so-called Maunder Minimum is the period of around 120 years of the Little Ice Age when telescopes were unable to discern many sunspots on the Sun, causing a cooling of the Earth's climate which occurred at the same time.

Currently, the sun is in the midst of the period designated as Cycle 24 and is ramping up toward the cycle's period of maximum activity. However, the recent findings indicate that the activity in the next 11-year solar cycle, Cycle 25, could be greatly reduced. In fact, some scientists are questioning whether this drop in activity could lead to a second Maunder Minimum, which was a 70-year period from 1645 to 1715 when the sun showed virtually no sunspots.

The fact that a serious scientific institution like CERN is willing to consider cosmic ray variations as another, or perhaps concomitant, cause of Global Warming and Cooling entirely independent of human industrial activity spells a serious threat from the serial dunce Al Gore and GOP candidate for POTUS Jon Huntsman, a true cat's-paw for the Obamandias Administration he served so faithfully and well as US Ambassador to China.

Perhaps the Manchurian Candidate in the White House has another Manchurian, or perhaps Han/Morman, candidate waiting in the Republican Party's leftward wing as a possible successor!?! Huntsman appears as vapid and insincere as Obama during the GOP debates at the Reagan Library last nite.

Some Humor From Unusual Places

2011-09-07T19:07:00.002-04:00

I found these gems on a site at Real Politics:

America needs Obama-care like Nancy Pelosi needs a Halloween mask. --Jay Leno

Q: Have you heard about McDonald's'new Obama Value Meal?

A: Order anything you likeand the guy behind you has to pay for it. --Conan O'Brien

Q: What does Barack Obama call lunch with a convicted felon?

A: A fund raiser. --Jay Leno

Q:
What's the difference betweenObama's cabinet and a penitentiary?

A: One
is filled with tax evaders, blackmailers, and threats to society.

The other is for housing prisoners. --David Letterman

Q:
If Nancy Pelosi and Obama were on a boat in the middle of the ocean and
it started to sink,who would be saved?

A: America ! --Jimmy Fallon

Q: What's the difference between Obama and his dog, Bo?

A: Bo has papers. --Jimmy Kimmel

Q: What was the most positive result ofthe "Cash for Clunkers" program?

A: It took 95% of theObama bumper stickers off the road. --David Letterman

Victor Davis Hanson: Assessment of the Decade after 9/11

2011-09-07T08:32:00.002-04:00

VDH has some select slices of wisdom in a short piece in The City Journal:

On October 7, just 26 days after the attacks, the United States went after both al-Qaida and its Taliban sponsors when it invaded Afghanistan, removing the Islamists from that nation’s major cities in little more than two months. By early 2002, the “graveyard of empires” had a UN-approved constitutional government—despite earlier warnings of Western failure and a Soviet- or British-like disaster. We forget now the national euphoria over Donald Rumsfeld’s “light footprint” and a new way of war characterized by a few Special Forces troops with laptops who guided volleys of GPS munitions from jets circling above.

The subsequent decision to invade Iraq in March 2003 ended entirely the fragile national consensus about retaliation that had followed 9/11. When the Bush administration hyped WMD as the real casus belli—and subsequently found none in Iraq—most forgot that Congress had, in bipartisan fashion, voted for war on over 20 other counts as well, all legitimate and unquestioned. But the postwar insurgency took over 4,000 American lives and tore Iraq apart, and the war would be written off as misguided, unnecessary, and “lost.” Suddenly too few troops was the charge. Traditional army divisions once again replaced Special Forces as the conventional wisdom.

Few thought, in the dark days of December 2006, that General David Petraeus and his Surge would save Iraq. But the U.S. military met the Islamists’ call for thousands of terrorists to flock to Anbar Province—defeating them, killing thousands, and thereby weakening the global jihadist cause. Soon Iraq, the “bad” war theater, would grow relatively quiet, while the once “good” effort in Afghanistan went bad. Over 100,000 Western NATO and American troops are still fighting a resurgent Taliban in a decade-long effort to prop up the government of Hamid Karzai.

Osama bin Laden had bet that the entire Arab world might erupt in turmoil after the U.S. response to 9/11. It did, but not until a decade later—and neither in anger at the United States, Europe, or Israel, nor at the urging of a reclusive bin Laden in the final months of his life. The more pundits sternly lectured that the “Arab-Israeli” conflict was at the heart of 9/11-generated Islamic anger at the West, the more that conflict seemed irrelevant to the violence that swept the Arab world from Tunisia to Syria. Bashar Assad is now shooting hundreds on sight—his own people, not soldiers of the IDF.

In a sense that VDH doesn't address, the two wars and other fiscal and monetary demands put a strain on the US economy that has led us to a debacle based on real estate values, much like that which pulverized Japan in 1990 and thereafter. Despite the misguided idealism of the CRA of Jimmy Carter & Bill Clinton, and the Dobbs-Frank and FanFred sidebars which caused home values to plummet, another iron bar in the American economic house of cards was the immense defense expenditures 9/11 caused the USA to undertake to confront radical Salafist Islam, much of its motivation and money emanating from erstwhile and still putative ally Saudi Arabia. VDH sees this in a different light, but we basically agree:

Conventional wisdom following 9/11 insisted that we would soon find bin Laden but that his insidious terror gang would probably remain a permanent existential threat that could repeat the September attack almost whenever it wished. A near-decade after the fall of the Twin Towers, bin Laden was finally killed by the United States, right under the nose of his Pakistani hosts. His radical Islamic terrorist organization is in disarray, without popular support, without the old covert subsidies from the oil sheikdoms, and without the infrastructure and networks that it would need to repeat its 9/11 attacks. The old post-9/11 warning of “not if, but when”—referring to the inevitability of more terrorism here—has not panned out so far, mostly because of heightened security at home and the projection of U.S. force abroad.

Following 2001, two additional and unforeseen shifts split America asunder, and—in equally unexpected fashion—are now bringing it back together again. Few initially objected to the Patriot Act, Guantánamo Bay, renditions, military tribunals, preventive detention, or the use of targeted assassinations via Predator drone. Even enhanced interrogations did not provoke polarizing national debate, given the extraordinary popularity of George W. Bush until 2003 and the widespread fear of more hijacked jetliners. But the unexpected violence in postwar Iraq, the partisan campaigning of the 2004 presidential election, the Abu Ghraib scandal, and the absence of more attacks politicized the war on terror, and the popular media reduced the Bush-Cheney administration nearly to the status of war criminals, people who had trumped up nonexistent threats in service to a police state desperate to invent enemies.

VDH ends with the unsurprising view that despite other shortcomings, POTUS Obama has done one thing right:

What happened next was even more bizarre. In his first year in the White House, Barack Obama, a war critic and foe of the Bush-Cheney protocols, embraced or expanded almost all of the measures that he and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party had long derided—apparently because what had seemed superfluous to a candidate proved essential to a president with responsibility for the safety of 300 million people. In lockstep, his supporters ceased their outcries about lost civil liberties. What had not long ago been decried as either unconstitutional or useless was suddenly assumed to be both legal and necessary—and surely not controversial enough to prompt questioning of the Obama administration, now the steward of the decade-old protocols.

And so, on the fifth anniversary of September 11 in 2006, the country had become split apart over Iraq, mostly amnesiac about Afghanistan, and receptive to the liberal narrative that the terrorists had won by scaring us into abandoning our values. In contrast, on the tenth anniversary, Americans have come nearly full circle: anxious about renewed violence in Afghanistan, increasingly unconcerned with Iraq, and relieved that postwar homeland security measures have kept them safe.

Finally, VDH comes to the conclusion that there is one thing that unites all Americans, whatever the many issues that continue to divide us:

The common denominator in these ten years? American life under its hypercritical, volatile, and mercurial democracy proves resilient; the Islamic terrorists and their authoritarian sponsors who would destroy it do not. And even after a decade of acrimony, partisan rancor, and stasis, Americans continue to be horrified—and angry—over those who were murdered on September 11. We’ve done our best for ten years to ensure that it cannot happen again.

And as noted by one column in the WSJ, on December 7th, 1951, the event "which will live on in infamy" had an almost non-existent anniversary. However, in the past decade, we have learned anew just how vulnerable America is both militarily and economically, and our response up to this point demonstrates that we may still, despite acrimony and recriminations on both sides of the political spectrum, continue to learn this lesson.

Hollyweird Hates Conservatives Due to A Malady Called Moral Degeneration

2011-09-07T08:14:00.003-04:00

Andrew Klavan makes sense of the inane recent statement by George Clooney that he doesn't want to get into politics because "we already have such a capable man at the helm" or gibberish to that effect:

Hollywood’s lockstep leftist filmmakers have long busied themselves with a range of shameful enterprises. They have peddled and celebrated a wholly distorted and negative vision of American manners in dishonest films epitomized by American Beauty (1999). They have sold the self-contradicting nonsense of moral relativism in films such as The Reader (2008). They have routinely depicted the U.S. government and U.S. corporations as bad actors in world events, as in The Bourne Ultimatum. And—in what some observers consider a conscious scheme by a likeminded filmland clique—they have maintained a small but steady effort to normalize the sexual abuse of children in films like Little Children, The Woodsman, Towelhead, and more.

But when it comes to sheer shamefulness, the conformist “radicals” of Hollywood outdid themselves in the years after the Islamofascist attacks on 9/11. When the United States responded to these atrocities by attempting to destroy the terrorist staging grounds in Afghanistan and establish a beachhead of Middle Eastern democracy in Iraq, Hollywood reacted by churning out propaganda movies that could only demoralize our allies and bolster our low and savage enemies: Syriana, In the Valley of Elah, Rendition, Redacted, Lions for Lambs, Green Zone, Body of Lies, Stop Loss, and on and on. Many of these films portrayed our soldiers and intelligence officers as rapists, murderers, torturers, or noble fools manipulated by conniving Republicans. Not one of them (including the excellent HBO film Taking Chance and the flawed but powerful Hurt Locker, which at least showed our troops in a positive light) depicted the wars themselves as good or noble endeavors. Besides Chance and Locker, these films were bad and they were bombs, showing that ideology, not art or commerce, dictated their content. It was the dark mirror image of Hollywood’s patriotic response to Pearl Harbor in the 1940s, a living diagram of what the Left has wrought in our cultural lives since then.

Now there is talk of a film memorializing the killing of bin Laden, and soldiers and veterans are beginning to show up as heroes in pictures like Source Code. But the fact that film depictions of the military may change somewhat now that a Democratic president has taken over and expanded on the war policies put in place by his Republican predecessor provides no excuse for what happened. When America really needed them, our filmmakers betrayed her. And because their unpatriotic products were made while our troops were under fire in the field, they constitute, when considered together, an unprecedentedly wicked action by an industry that rose to success and power through celebrating the nation and values that it now mindlessly attacks.

But while wealthy, coddled, and arrogant movie-world fat cats are easy targets for rebuke—and while everyone involved in this moral debacle deserves a thrashing—they are, as it were, only the bubbles at the surface of the boiling cauldron of America’s intellectual dysfunction. The majority of artists are not deep or original thinkers. They are merely people gifted with the ability to give “a local habitation and a name” to the ideas their intellectual guides and mentors find fashionable. The Left is still ascendant in our academies and media. More than that, it is committed to strangling, through blacklists and unfounded charges of racism and bigotry, the intellectual diversity that might challenge their primacy. As a result, many of our artists’ minds have become straitjacketed by “progressive” and relativist notions that had their heyday among honest thinkers 50 years ago and have been crashing and burning in the real world ever since.

It’s no surprise, then, that most of our creative types have failed to formulate a forthright response to the ongoing Islamist threat—the dual threat of open violence and Sharia imperialism. That response requires the death of nonsensical relativism and the rebirth of foundational values. Post-postmodern intellectuals need to understand that, just as the grand and reasoned structure of mathematics stands on the rock of unshakeable axioms, so the cathedral of human morality is built on certain truths. These truths that we hold to be self-evident—that people are endowed not by governments but by their Creator with equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—are not good for some people sometimes but for all people eternally. As such, they are not only a humane basis for opposition to Islamism, but the very stuff and soul of art—the beginning of a reclamation from its current degeneracy and shame.

Since "Post-postmodern intellectuals" refuse to raise themselves out of their cloacal mindsets to the extent even to recognize that a concept such as "truth" exists, Mr. Klavan won't convince many of them. However, Jon Voight's recent conversion of David Mamet to sanity by giving him the wonderful assessment of America contained in Witness, by Whittaker Chambers, there is hope that some, like John Kenneth Galbraith, who called Chambers perhaps America's greatest intellectual of the twentieth century, might use their minds instead of following that herd-instinct bred into the "useful idiots" that Lenin despised so much.

Arthur Koestler: My Favorite Author

2011-09-05T14:45:00.002-04:00

Darkness at Noon was famously blocked from becoming a Hollyweird movie by Clifford Odets, a Commie who deserved blacklisting and frankly, much harsher punishment than that, for keeping the literary masterpiece from the screen. Gramsci's philosophy still works overtime ln its corraling media, academicide and union thuggery into a Marxist killing floor. Koestler saw the evils of Communism when suddemly he found his Marxist comrades in Spain, after escaping Franco's firing squads, killing Trotskyites in their ranks. It was the light bulb going on in the brain of a brainwashed intellectual, a member of the "intelligentsia," always the easiest herd to drive over a cliff in a stampede of political correctness...!!! Kronstadt in 1921 proved Lenin & Trotskyite Bolshevism were a variant of fascism, Stalin was the logical end-product, an administrative genius with a ruthless brutality that made a lot of Nazis look like altar boys. The Communists opposed the Social Democrats in the 1933 German elections that brought a Nazi plurality to power and this act of perfidy made the 1939 Non-Aggression Pact between Ribbentrop and Molotov a mere coda to an alliance very similar to that of Hitler and Mussolini. The Soviets immediately began handing over to the Germans the fruits of their spy ring in DC and NY, including the Norden Bomb Site which increased the accuracy of high-level bombers immensely. This is all pointed out in Sam Tanenhaus's biography of Whittaker Chambers, which didn't win a Pulitzer because Victor Navasky and his Hiss-loving skank-princess Katrina Van Den Heuvel, put down their cloven hooves in protest. Like any mad genius, Koestler had his moral pockmarks, mostly of a sexual nature that would make Woody Allen look like a Trappist Monk. Here's the end of Christopher Caldwell's summary of "Koestler - The Political and Literary Odyssey of a Twentieth Century Skeptic" in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, edited and run by none other than Sam Tanenhaus himself:

Scammell’s is an authorized biography and a sympathetic one. But the Koestler he depicts is consistently repugnant — humorless, megalomaniac, violent. Like many people concerned about “humanity,” he was contemptuous of actual humans. He ignored and snubbed his mother (who had pawned her last diamond to pay for his passage to Palestine), and he rebuffed every attempt to arrange a meeting between him and his illegitimate daughter. What made him such a creep? Perhaps alcohol — Koestler threw tables in restaurants and was arrested for drunken driving on many occasions. Perhaps insecurity — he was tormented by his shortness (barely 5 feet 6 inches) and used to stand on tippy-toe at cocktail parties. “We all have inferiority complexes of various sizes,” Koestler’s Communist editor Otto Katz once told him. “But yours isn’t a complex — it’s a cathedral.”

In the late 1990s, Jill Craigie, the wife of the Labour politician Michael Foot, told Cesarani that Koestler had raped her decades earlier. The scandal that resulted when Cesarani’s own Koestler biography was published embroiled Scammell, who had defended Koestler in 1995 against an allegation of attempted rape made by Foot. Scammell argues here that “the exercise of male strength to gain sexual satisfaction wasn’t exactly uncommon at that time” and that “Craigie’s story and Cesarani’s embellishment of it have left a stain on Koestler’s reputation far larger than he deserves.”

He is wrong. Posterity has let Koestler off lightly. Every scrap of evidence that Scammell himself has so impartially gathered argues in favor of crediting Craigie’s story. Bertrand Russell’s wife claimed Koestler tried to rape her, too. “Without an element of initial rape,” Koestler wrote the woman who would be his second wife, “there is no delight.” One girlfriend called him “an odd mixture of consideration, thoughtfulness and extraordinary brutality.” Certain aspects of Koestler’s sexism — in particular, his expectation that his girlfriends serve him as stenographers and maids — are indeed mitigated by the era in which he lived. His pattern of predation and violence, though, is a vice of a different order. It shocked those who encountered it.

Cyril Connolly was right to see Koestler as a journalist of genius. In this Koestler can be likened to the three contemporaries — Albert Camus, Whittaker Chambers and George Orwell — who were his closest allies. If Koestler had a wider intellectual range than they, however, he had a narrower artistic one. It is a strange thing that this person known to the world primarily as a novelist can fairly be said not to have had a literary bone in his body. The critic Leslie Fiedler once remarked that “Promise and Fulfillment,” Koestler’s 1949 book about Israel, should be filed “under K for Koestler, not I for Israel.” The point can be made more generally: In print as in life, he was driven by ego, not principle. His subject was himself. And yet, at a moment when the ghastliness of Soviet Communism was still invisible to a lot of thinking people, this apparently conscienceless man awakened the conscience of the West.

Markets are More Efficient and Accountable than Govts.

2011-09-03T07:45:00.002-04:00

No means testing (as in Rep. Paul Ryan's budget roadmap) will be introduced to determine eligibility for full Medicare benefits, and most Social Security benefits will continue to start for individuals at age 65 or younger.

In a nutshell, there is little political will to reduce spending on entitlements by limiting them mainly to persons in need.

State and local governments also greatly increased their spending as tax revenues rolled in during the good economic times that preceded the collapse in 2008. This spending included extensive commitments to deferred benefits that could not be easily reduced after the recession hit, especially pensions and health-care benefits to retired government workers.

Unless states like California and Illinois, and cities like Chicago, take drastic steps to reduce their deferred spending, their problems will multiply as this spending grows over time. A few newly elected governors, such as Scott Walker in Wisconsin, have pushed through reforms to curtail the power of unionized state employees. But most other governors have been afraid to take on the unions and their political supporters.
Political cowardice reigns and small businessmen---the sturdy backbone of American capitalism---are being slowly destroyed by attrition as surely as the kulaks in the happily-defunct USSR were destroyed by relocation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. In America, we destroy our true national treasures, those with the imagination, habits of diligence and foresight, access tp spo,e cap[tal and the courageous risk-taking attitude that make a small business start, grow and hopefully if things work out, prosper. The rest of the world is in just as bad a predicament:

Numerous examples illustrate government failure in other countries as well. Highly publicized are the troubles facing Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain that are mainly due to the growth in spending and debt of their governments prior to the 2008 crisis. Perhaps the governments of these countries, and the banks that bought their debt, expected Germany and other rich members of the European Union to bail them out if they got into trouble. Whatever the explanation, the reckless behavior by these governments will greatly harm businesses and consumers in their countries along with taxpayers of countries coming to their rescue.

The traditional case for private competitive markets goes back to Adam Smith (and even earlier writers). It is mainly based on abundant evidence that most of the time competitive markets work quite well, usually much better than government alternatives. The main reason is not that individuals in the private sector are intrinsically better than government bureaucrats and politicians, but rather that competitive pressures discipline market behavior much more effectively than government actions.

The lesson is that it is crucial to consider whether government regulations and laws are likely to improve rather than worsen the performance of private markets. In an article "Competition and Democracy" published more than 50 years ago, I said "monopoly and other imperfections are at least as important, and perhaps substantially more so, in the political sector as in the marketplace. . . . Does the existence of market imperfections justify government intervention? The answer would be no, if the imperfections in government behavior were greater than those in the market."

The widespread demand after the financial crisis for radical modifications to capitalism typically paid little attention to whether in fact proposed government substitutes would do better, rather than worse, than markets.

Government regulations and laws are obviously essential to any well-functioning economy. Still, when the performance of markets is compared systematically to government alternatives, markets usually come out looking pretty darn good.

Gary Becker is right when he points out that more laissez-faire rather than hypothetically government-sponsored "programs" to "retrain" employees in mid-life for another skill set----or whatever the other do-gooder well-meaning bienpensant chicanery that the Obungler crowd is cooking up. In reality, there are hundreds of overlapping programs on the books that are already overfunded and underproductive that simply adding dozens more legislative schemes in order to point to one's good faith is becoming farcical.

Plus the hard-headed GOP crowd in Congress is much less susceptible to botox poisoning of the brain, leading to fatuous futility, than Queen Bee Pelosi's collection of sideshow feminista types [thinking of DeLauro & Wassermann-Schultz] and their Bravo Channel male ilk, which means that despite this O'Bozo attempt to invite himself to address Congress---happily conflicting with the Packer/Saints game which will draw two dozen viewers for every Obama watcher next Thursday night, is due for abject failure---much like the Stimulus/Porkulus union-building charade already has done.

I wonder if the GOP will even ask for facetime to rebut O'Bozo's teleprompter twaddle next Thursday, or will they be more interested in serious pastimes like an NFL contest between the last two Super Bowl Champs?

Cheney Reflects in his book "In My Time."

2011-09-03T05:49:00.004-04:00

Dick Cheney is a singular public servant. He took the job as Veep after GWB appointed him head of a group to look for a likely candidate in the election campaign and then Bush 43 decided to choose Cheney, OVER CHENEY'S OWN OBJECTIONS. Of course, Dick Cheney could have made a Shermanesque, "If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve" statement, but his sense of public duty called him into what he calls "this business" even after six or so cardiac events, the first before he was forty years old. He expected, I suspect, to have another one in office. He deserves credit for accepting a task he may have thought fatal.

I didn't like Dick Cheney very much as his operational style did not exude much personal charm, and I would guess this might be because of his laconic Wyoming roots. My only memory of Wyoming is running out of gasoline there once and trying to hitch a ride to the nearest gas station, with more than an hour going by before one of the many cars picked me up to take me the twenty miles to get a jerrycan of gas. It is generally a harsh and very windy place, except for a few idyllic spots like Jackson Hole. Cheney is perhaps more of a "cowboy" than Yalie GWB ever was. Here's a representative set of paragraphs from Dan Henninger's excellent interview:

Foremost were the "wiretapping" controversies over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which the administration expanded to monitor phone calls from foreign terrorists into the U.S. After its approval, the program required presidential reauthorization every 30 to 45 days. Mr. Cheney described for me the briefings on the program by CIA Director Michael Hayden to the congressional leadership. "The Big Nine, we called them," Mr. Cheney says. They included Nancy Pelosi, then a member of the House intelligence committee. No one, he says, objected to the program.

The FISA program worked until 2004. Then the administration's internal unity fell apart. White House aides who had gone to have the authorization renewal signed by Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was in George Washington hospital, found the recently appointed deputy attorney general, James Comey, was already there.

Before the aides had left the White House, Mr. Cheney told me, "it's my understanding that Ashcroft said fine, send them over and he'd sign. Between the time of the phone call and the time when they got there, he'd done a 180 and Comey was in the room." Mr. Ashcroft refused to sign. Mr. Cheney relates in his book that Mr. Comey also convinced FBI Director Robert Mueller to withdraw support.

"There clearly was a development inside the Justice Department that led Comey and Mueller to express their disapproval (of the surveillance authority) after it had been approved 20 times," Mr. Cheney said. With resignations threatened, President Bush altered the program, despite assurances of its constitutionality.

Now that even a truthful public servant like Leon Panetta admitted after Bin Laden's death that waterboarding had provided key info after Khalid Sheikh Mohammed began to sing like a birdie after several session, the FISA and other programs protecting the USA are seen in a new light. The April 2002 international conference on Israel and Palestine supported by Powell and his deputy Armitage was probably a bad idea, but in hindsight may have prevented the 2006 elections from allowing a Hamas takeover of Gaza. Then again, given the way the Second Law of Thermodynamics [entropy] works in the region, probably not. Too many cooks always ruin any grand buffet prepared under UN auspices.

On another subject, Cheney has a point in his disagreement with Rice & Christopher Hill about the North Korean wild goose chase, started by the insufferable ineffable do-gooder Jimmy Carter when he famously [though it's covered up in the liberal canonical narrative even to this day] made an "illegal" trip violating the Logan Act in 1994 to Pyongyang over Bill Clinton's strenuous objections. The effort by the failed peanut farmer was followed up by Madeleine Albright and the net result was that from one-to-two million North Koreans died of starvation while the US bribed the Norks with over a billion dollars to inspect a nuke facility which the invidious Norks used to build and continue their program, despite "promising" to stop their program. Net result: a stronger hold by the hopelessly fascist Communist regime over its enslaved populace. And to this day, political prisoners are flayed alive, people are starving to death in the outer provinces, and people like Condi Rice and Christopher Hill are trying to employ smoke, mirrors and mental opiates to achieve an illusion of some sort of "progress."

I saw Condi Rice on the latest 30Rock with classless asshole Alec Baldwin where AB's TV wife is kidnapped by the North Koreans and forced to marry Kim Jung-Il's retarded successor-son. She played some dynamite piano and the conceit that AB had broken up with her in a previous engagement by email was the high point of a tasteless, but funny vignette. I wonder if she reflected on her own fecklessness----of which North Korean hallucinations take place to the insistence by Condi that Hamas participate in January. '06 elections that resulted in a confrontation state in the insanely overcrowded Gaza Strip---a territory so hopeless that Egypt refused to take it back after the '67 War ended and Israel wanted it off its hands. Another thing you never read about---Condi's idealism is laudable, but it only gets her comic bits on 30Rock, not a substantive record for achievement.

The most interesting anecdote is about the Surge, where Cheney discovers that leaks about doubts concerning the Surge's viability are inveighed against by Dick, only to be told by NSC advisor Steve Hadley that POTUS GWB himself instructed Steve to make the leaks---Machiavellian maneuvering by the widely-read Bush, whose interest in history was sincere and far deeper than the understanding of the present occupant of the White House.

Powell's pettinss and Armitage's outright dishonesty and cowardice and ultimately, Armitage's loyalty, are all of a piece with the Armitage strategy of not revealing that he was the source of the Valerie Plame leaks, leading Scooter Libby to twist slowly in the wind while Prosecutor Fitzgerald, who already knew of Armitage's perfidy, went through a Kabuki charade and got Plame and Wilson on the cover of Vanity Fair, a dubious achievement and worthy of the Powell/Armitage gravitas quotient in foreign policy and inside-the-Beltway chicanery.

Powell is now imitating Winston Churchill in abandoning Barack Obama as he flails and flounders and even the lamestream MSM can't cover for the Manchurian Candidate or divert attention from the incompetent POTUS to John Boehner, as a serial dwarf named Mark Shields tried to do on his weekly over-the-hill agitprop session with the simpering slimeball David Brooks on the Friday evening follies on The Lehrer Report.

I find it a bit sad that David Petraeus has tarnished a brilliant career, far more impressive than the somewhat politicized ascent of Colin Powell to the highest levels of government, by accepting the CIA position, although Panetta has shown that one can retain his integrity [thought not the support of the treasonous lamestreamers and their lackeys] in that exalted stratosphere.

What is left unsaid in Cheney's general praise of his boss for political courage and, in the case of the Surge, absolute brilliant Texas-Hold-'Em pulling hot chestnuts out of a fire that a traitor playing the role of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in the midst of a wartime situation enunciated that "The war is lost" is somewhat counterbalanced by GWB's own machinations and too-clever-by-half chessboard moves, if I can dignify the authorized leaks against the Surge as such.

The sad problem in the rapidly deteriorating public "marketplace of ideas" lies in the constant mantras advanced by a completely discredited and repudiated "intelligentsia" which claims that any American elected offical who attempts to defend or advance our national interests is "stupid" such as Ronald Reagan was when he brought down the Soviet "Evil Empire," an apt description as I am in the middle of finally reading The Gulag Archipelago.

Cheney himself --- like his somewhat RINO boss GWB --- not only faced charges of lack of intelligence, but mendacity and venal moneymaking schemes through Halliburton's contracting activities in Iraq.

Now that we see the White House and Energy Dept actively implicated in the Solodyne panel dispute to the tune of $535 million, we shall see if the usual hypocrisy of the Demonrats comes forward with idiotic excuses. It has taken almost a year for Cong. Issa to pry open the Fast-and-Furious fiasco enough to reveal DOJ and Homeland Security stonewalling. Let's see if the WaPo and NYT display ANY signs of integrity on the real and persistent lack of cohesion and coherence in this administration, which is threatening to make Jimmy Carter's look "honest and sincere," if that can be taken as a compliment among the cynics living on the two Left Coasts, in comparison.

All in all, Dick Cheney has proven to be a better Veep than his incompetent predecessor, the ineffably venal and stupid and dishonest Al Gore as well as his ridiculous and outright silly successor, the Irish blathermonger and unending foot-in-the-mouth gaffer Joe Biden.

That's being damned by faint praise, but I'm going to finally buy the Cheney book, as well as David Mamet's sonderful "Secret Knowledge."

All this while reading Tony Judt's Postwar and his other great book Reappraisals while working through The Gulag Archipelago and Sam Tanenhaus's biography of Whittaker Chambers.

As for the Chambers bio, there is absolutely nothing new about a slanderous and even treasonous MSM in the USA. From the very first inkling of treason on the left, the MSM aligned with the enemies of the United States and gave aid and support to Hiss while slandering Chambers to a degree that shames the left to this day. The Left's insistent agenda to destroy any semblance of fair play or balanced judgment remains constant. The head of Harvard's Psychiatry Department announced that Chambers was victim of all sorts of delusional behavior, despite never having analyzed him in a conversation, as is required [Shades of 1000 shrinks calling Goldwater mentally ill, none of whom had ever talked to Barry face-to-face]. And the press actually made fun of the fact that Chambers' brother Dick had committed suicide, despite the fact that Hiss's father and sister both killed themselves [and another brother of Hiss died at thirty, a hopeless alcoholic]. To this day, the traitor Victor Navasky, or what's left of him, insists that Alger Hiss was not a spy and did not perjure himself, despite copious evidence from the now-unsealed East Bloc intelligence archives. The left's inability to advance its arguments by any means except subversion and dissembling double talk remain unchanged over the last one hundred years. Luckily, Chambers' friends at Columbia like Jacques Barzun [still alive at 105] & Mark Van Doren & others like Lionel Trilling, Louis Zukofsky, Meyer Schapiro, and other contemporaries did attest to Chambers' absolute brilliance, whenever he put his strange, shambolic, bizarre personality in order. Whittaker Chambers was a strange tormented man who wrote the best autobiography of the twentieth century. Alger Hiss went to his grave an unrepentent traitor. At least Bill Ayers admits his perfidy and now hints his authorship of Dreams of My Father. Gotta give Bill at least that benefit, the guy can write, though not as well as Chambers, and he's honest enough to admit his treason.

But as for Navasky and a horde of liars like Jonathan Alter and Eric Altermann, there are no minds more dishonest and more closed than those on the ideological left.

NRO on Steve Jobs as the Greatest Failure in the History of Business

2011-09-02T01:14:00.006-04:00

Nick Schulz is an AEI Fellow who hits the nail on the head with this article about how often the guy who changed the entire planet's way of life by introducing us all to things we DIDN'T know we needed or wanted committed epic fail after epic fail.

Jobs failed better than anyone else in Silicon Valley, maybe better than anyone in corporate America. By that I mean Jobs did what only the greatest entrepreneurs can do: learn from their failures. I don’t mean learn from their mistakes. I mean learn from their abject, humiliating, bonehead, epic fails.
Everyone today thinks of Jobs as the genius who gave us the iPod, MacBooks, the iTunes store, the iPhone, the iPad, and so on. Yes, he transformed personal computing and multimedia. But let’s not forget what else Jobs did.

Jobs (along with Steve Wozniak) brought us the Apple I and Apple II computers, early iterations of which sold in the mere hundreds and were complete failures. Not until the floppy disk was introduced and sufficient RAM added did the Apple II take off as a successful product.

The list goes on and on and on......

Jobs was the architect of Lisa, introduced in the early 1980s. You remember Lisa, don’t you? Of course you don’t. But this computer — which cost tens of millions of dollars to develop — was another epic fail. Shortly after Lisa, Apple had a success with its Macintosh computer. But Jobs was out of a job by then, having been tossed aside thanks to the Lisa fiasco.

Jobs went on to found NeXT Computer, which was a big nothing-burger of a company. Its greatest success was that it was purchased by Apple — paving the way for the serial failure Jobs to return to his natural home. Jobs’s greatest successes were to come later — iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, and more

Schulz left out Newton, the forerunner of iPad and who wouldda thunk that Jobs would return to the concept of a small handheld tablet after getting scorched on that particular venture into fiscal futility...? But Steve did. He had that indefinable and almost extinct genius that Thomas Edison and Henry Ford had, the ability to make our lives different through dozens of inventions [with Edison the light bulb and stock ticker and movie projector etc & with Ford the assembly line enabling everyman to own a cheap automobile], things we never really knew we needed until they came to us in cheap & BRILLIANTLY ENGINEERED & DESIGNED & AFFORDABLE forms that suddenly captured the country and then the entire planet by storm.

Jobs is a great entrepreneur for another reason. Lots of ninnies can give customers products they want. Jobs gave people products they didn’t know they wanted, and then made those products indispensable to their lives.

I didn’t know I needed the ability to read the Wall Street Journal and The Corner on a handsome handheld device at my breakfast table, on the Metro, on the Acela, or in any Starbucks I entered. But Steve Jobs did. I didn’t know I wanted to mix and match my music collection on a computer and take it with me wherever I went, but Steve Jobs did. I didn’t know I wanted a portable multimedia platform that would permit me and my kids to hurl angry birds out of a slingshot at thieving pigs. But Steve Jobs did.

All those successes were made possible by failure after failure after failure and the lessons learned from those failures.

Of course, Schulz put the moral of the story front and center:

There’s a moral here for a Washington culture that fears failure too much. In today’s Washington, large banks aren’t permitted to fail; nor are large auto firms. Next up will be too-big-to-fail hospital systems. Steve Jobs is a reminder that failure is a good and necessary thing. And that sometimes the greatest glories are born of catastrophe.

Nowadays, kids are given pass/fail courses in school and every participant in every sports league gets a trophy. The idea of competition is now being suppressed and the fear of psychologically harming youngsters who may lose in a hard-fought contest actually is now being used to lessen the spirit of Vince Lombardi, for instance, when he proclaimed "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing."

[WARNING: Long Slightly Off-Topic Autobiographical Excursion Follows:]
All of which reminded me of an episode in my life which is a tiny vignette: I was about to be interviewed for a very good and prestigious position at the Woodrow Wilson Institute in the Old Iconic Smithsonian HQ Building with the turrets and parapets looming over the south side of the Mall before a small panel of four or five Wilson Center graybeards and their female colleagues, if memory serves, but happened to overhear a sort of pre-briefing on my qualifications given by a young woman who knew nothing about me personally except that I had served overseas in several countries for the State Dept & done a couple of Foggy Bottom positions, then left State to do TV production & other very interesting work as Asst. Producer for "Death of a Princess" for PBS on the murder of a young princess by public execution for running off with a young Saudi of non-royal status. Georgie Ann Geyer told me subsequently that the viewer ratings for the three-part series were the highest in the history of PBS EVER and my work with Bert Van Munster, later creator/producer of "Cops" and still the executive producer of "The Amazing Race" had been one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life.

Meantime, waiting for the Wilson job, the door had [inadvertently, I believe] been left slightly ajar and as I sat waiting outside for the panel's inquiries, I could overhear her telling the panel that I had "failed in every job which I had taken on in my State Department career and thereafter." This advance prepping done by a young Ivy female preppie was blatantly tendentious, but since I was not supposed to have eavesdropped, I thought it would be bad form to bring up this rather silly and superficial prejudicial and slightly dumb as well as non-classy and ignorant faux pas by a young woman whom I had met and conversed with for less than ten minutes in my whole lifetime. The panel interview turned out to be bland and uneventful---no one asked any "hard" questions. And the young woman who had given the sort of chilling pre-curtain raising appraisal had been briefed by another woman with whom I had had some difficulties on the PBS shoot---as they would have said much more colorfully in Goodfellas---it was an inside-the-Beltway thing with all the inconsequential and unimportant lack of gravitas that academic politics has in a slightly similar environment---like a tenure squabble of the sort that drove Amy Bishop into being a homicidal maniac, but which hardly left me breaking a sweat.

And I reflected on how little it meant to be regarded as a "failure in every job" when I had glowing personnel reports, but had always been a little "out of the box" on certain positions & may have seemed a square peg to some who wanted seamless round peg/round hole orthodoxy on every issue. As a final coda and denoument, I learned very shortly after that a very qualified person, more qualified than I in my own view, had already secured a lock on the position. Not only that, I was a friend of the dude and subsequently he performed very well, having been a Middle East Ambassador to Syria, & my own relations with him had previously been and continued to be warm and even friendly.

But as it happened, the short-term result was that there were no fallback positions available and I took on a couple of jobs way out of my accustomed skill set [being a courier, a pizza delivery man, then a bartender and then a member of Mondale's national staff in 1984, although by then I had come to admire Ronald Reagan. I soon got a job at selling bonds, passed my NASD 7 & NASD 63 and embarked on a whole new direction in my life, while my faithful wife took on jobs as a country representative with a very well-connected PR firm and even represented [she had a law degree] the National Society of Tort Lawyers as well as countries such as Panama and Greece. And during my wife's success at PR, she was also able to sell reak estate working with a broker's license. She even sold a couple of homes to State Dept. friends of mine, including David Welch, just yesterday in the Al Jazeera news supposedly implicated in trying to get Qaddafi out of his PR jam as recently as August 12th [David's subsequent career after Marilyn sold him and Gretchen the home in Chevy Chase was spectacularly successful, as Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Asst. Sec'y of State for the Middle East, and upon retirement, a Bechtel corporate official.]

In the same period, I then rebounded to work in a DC boutique stock & bond firm connected to Drexel Burnham Lambert, then segued to working for Denis Neal's lobbying firm, working on Morocco, Pakistan, the Sudan and backstopping other countries in the region. I even met Charlie Wilson and have a bit part in the book [though not the movie] "Charlie Wilson's War." I ended up suddenly with a job offer to take the position of International Editor of the Oil Daily & my first overseas trip was to Vienna just after my daughter Nicola was born in May, 1989. I can remember calling home from the famous Imperial Hotel in Vienna, where Wagner composed several of his best musical scores, during the Tienanmen Square fiasco which coincided with an OPEC meeting in Vienna, hearing Niki's crying and laughter across the Atlantic where I had been driving as a courier & pizza dude just two-three years before. I also worked for Charlie Waterman at Jefferson Waterman on side projects The Oil Daily was aware of and which didn't interfere with my daily reporting. The weirdest moment was a phone conversation with the chief stockholder & virtual owner/megaboss of Occidental Petroleum, the [in]famous [?] and eccentric Armand Hammer, who told me admiringly he thought my columns in The Oil Daily the best reading of his day [Of course, when the colorful AH died a year later, the stock in his company rose over 20%!!!]. I also had a chance to travel to the Gulf War in 1990 as the ONLY oil reporter in the Gulf War, which of course was primarily over oil and subsoil rights. My good friend Adel Al-Jubair [currently Saudi Ambassador to the US] had managed to get me the visa, over the strenuous opposition of the Saudi Ministry of Information, who wanted a strict prohibition on reporters for oil publications. My access to high-ranking Saudis due to my previous residence as Political Officer in Saudi the previous decade gave me face-time on CNN, MacNeil-Lehrer, NBC & CBS as well as the opportunity to ask questions on the televised daily briefings in Riyadh. In addition, I drove Pulitzer reporter Caryl Murphy around town [she needed a chauffeur as a Washington Post reporter doing her interviews] and got some sidebar info using her status as a door-opener. Soon after Desert Storm was over, out of all this print & TV exposure, Amoco Corporation noticed and hired me for a salary & benefits package in late 1991 amounting to close to six-figures. In the five years after that humiliating Wilson interview [there were other episodes and vignettes not quite so shaming, but looking for a job is always a humbling exercise.

All this boring personal commentary is a feeble attempt to elucidate that when life presents you with lemons, there are many ways to make lemonade and an occasional lowering of income and social status [delivering pizzas to then radio DJ Larry King broadcasting out of Alexandria and a famous black sportscaster whose name escapes me this late at night [Crossman?!?} was hardly suitable resume-building material, but bouncing back is an essential component of what life is all about.

So when I see the bizarre ups and downs of Steve Jobs' and Steve Wozniak using their talents [and Jobs' admitted fast-and-furious razzle-dazzle] to recover from failed attempts that blew a lot of hopeful shareholders' money out the window, I can only remember my own much less successful, but similarly chequered career. Driving as a courier & delivering pies & slinging drinks in a Georgetown disco-bar & restaurant [closed for too many violations due to fake IDs shortly after I graduated to selling municipal bonds through cold calls in a bucket shop ] are hardly suitable bullet points in my long and singular resume. I do remember that Steve Jobs went to Pixar---a much more glorious sidestep on his way up the ladder to ultimate planetary domination of innovation & growing his Apple firm [being rehired by a company that fired you reminds me of Churchill's famous apothegm---"it takes courage to rat, but considerable ingenuity to re-rat" when WC jumped from Conservative to Liberal and then back to Conservative] to a size larger than Exxon/Mobil if only for a few days. His life is the most interesting biography, perhaps, of anyone still alive in the business world of the last seven decades---making Trump & Buffett & even Gates look dull boring in comparison....!

Taking his Newton concept and reworking it several different technological twisting ways and finally massaging a glorious failure in the nineties into the greatest success in IT history in 2010 with the phenomenal sales of iPad & the iterations of his other innovations---you have to hand Jobs a unique and singular laurel wreath of the Unbeatable "Comeback King of Corporate Chutzpah." [TM]

I don't think you can find anyone in the history of Sports, Politics or Business who can even approach Steve Jobs in magnitude and sheer glorious triumph even after he was finally downed by the worst adversity anyone can ever encounter---the "Big C," as film legend John Wayne used to call the dreaded and still ultimate champion---Cancer.

Martin Wolf at FT on the Great Contraction

2011-08-31T23:51:00.003-04:00

The FT's Martin Wolf is the best analyst of the world's economic situation on the planet, bar none, or at least the best I've ever come across in the three decades since I worked for Drexel Burnham Lambert back in the '80s. Paul Krugman isn't worthy of shining Martin's shoes and Larry Summers has faded since the days when I used to have lunch with him [and a dozen other Mid-America Committee members] in Chicago---he's sold his soul to the political dwarves of the Dbag Party in the WH after being kicked out of Harvard by the PMS squad of crones united against freedom of speech. Here's Martin in today's FT:

What has the market turmoil of August been telling us? The answer, I suggest, is three big things: first, the debt-encumbered economies of the high-income countries remain extremely fragile; second, investors have next to no confidence in the ability of policymakers to resolve the difficulties; and, third, in a time of high anxiety, investors prefer what are seen as the least risky assets, namely, the bonds of the most highly rated governments, regardless of their defects, together with gold. Those who fear deflation buy bonds; those who fear inflation buy gold; those who cannot decide buy both. But few investors or corporate managers wish to take on any longer-term investment risks.
Welcome, then, to what Carmen Reinhart, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, and Harvard’s Kenneth Rogoff call “the second great contraction” (the Great Depression of the 1930s being the first). Those less apocalyptic might call it the “Japanese disease”.

Ms. Reinhart and Rogoff of course are the authors of This Time is Different, Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, a monumental book which will probably earn them a place along with Hayek and Keynes and Shumpeter among other financial demi-god gurus. Pete Peterson is himself a world-class maitre d' of running one of the most influential financial think tanks on the planet---like a year-round Davos. Wolf goes on:

Many ask whether high-income countries are at risk of a “double dip” recession. My answer is: no, because the first one did not end. The question is, rather, how much deeper and longer this recession or “contraction” might become. The point is that, by the second quarter of 2011, none of the six largest high-income economies had surpassed output levels reached before the crisis hit, in 2008 (see chart). The US and Germany are close to their starting points, with France a little way behind. The UK, Italy and Japan are languishing far behind.

Wolf dives into the economic complexities with the finesse of a financialmaistro waving a baton before an orchestra of horns, woodwinds and other instruments.

The authoritative National Bureau of Economic Research of the US does define a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months”. This is to focus on the change in output, rather than its level. Normally, that makes sense. But this recession is not normal. When economies suffer such steep collapses, as they did during the worst of the crisis (the peak to trough fall in gross domestic product having varied between 3.9 per cent in France and 9.9 per cent in Japan), an expansion that fails to return output to the starting point will not feel like recovery. This is especially true if unemployment remains high, employment low and spare capacity elevated. In the US, unemployment is still double its pre-crisis rates.
The depth of the contraction and the weakness of the recovery are both result and cause of the ongoing economic fragility. They are a result, because excessive private sector debt interacts with weak asset prices, particularly of housing, to depress demand. They are a cause, because the weaker is the expected growth in demand, the smaller is the desire of companies to invest and the more subdued is the impulse to lend. This, then, is an economy that fails to achieve “escape velocity” and so is in danger of falling back to earth.

The politics of a great contraction are daunting. Especially since the two politcal leaders nominally overseeing the strange political chemistry generated by the failing economies are "bystanders of unfolding events."

....consider, against this background of continuing fragility, how people view the political scene. In neither the US nor the eurozone, does the politician supposedly in charge – Barack Obama, the US president, and Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor – appear to be much more than a bystander of unfolding events, as my colleague, Philip Stephens, recently noted. Both are – and, to a degree, operate as – outsiders. Mr Obama wishes to be president of a country that does not exist. In his fantasy US, politicians bury differences in bipartisan harmony. In fact, he faces an opposition that would prefer their country to fail than their president to succeed. Ms Merkel, similarly, seeks a non-existent middle way between the German desire for its partners to abide by its disciplines and their inability to do any such thing. The realisation that neither the US nor the eurozone can create conditions for a speedy restoration of growth – indeed the paralysing disagreements over what those conditions might be – is scary.
This leads us to the third big point: the dire consequences of soaring risk aversion, against the background of such economic fragility. In the long journey to becoming ever more like Japan, the yields on 10-year US and German government bonds are now down to where Japan’s had fallen in October 1997, at close to 2 per cent (see chart). Does deflation lie ahead in these countries, too? One big recession could surely bring about just that. That seems to me to be a more plausible danger than the hyperinflation that those fixated on fiscal deficits and central bank balance sheet find so terrifying.
A shock caused by a huge fight over fiscal policy – the debate over the terms on which to raise the debt ceiling – has caused a run into, not out of, US government bonds. This is not surprising for two reasons: first, these are always the first port in a storm; second, the result will be a sharp tightening of fiscal policy. Investors guess that the outcome will be a still weaker economy, given the enfeebled state of the private sector. Again, in a still weaker eurozone, investors have run into the safe haven of German government bonds.

I'm at risk of violating FT's draconian ukases against excessive quotation of their outstanding analyses, but let me refer you to Philip Stephens lmentioned above and then allow you to link and read the rest of Wolf's sobering conclusions. We may be in for a sort of economicGotterdaemmerung in Europe and the USA and Stephans' comment:

...the fact that the debt ceiling decision went to the wire speaks eloquently of the diminished authority of the White House. In any event, the deal cobbled together in Congress does little to address the federal government’s fiscal sustainability. The much touted spending cuts are just another promissory note. The angry name-calling that preceded them damaged America’s international authority. I am not among the Cassandras who think the US has fallen into irreversible decline. Mr Obama, though, does not make it any easier to present the contrary case.

is not very reassuring that The Twilight of The Economic Gods are lengthening the shadows over what Spengler almost 100 years ago published as Die Untergang Des Abendlands, AKA The Decline of the West.

How to Tell The REAL & the FAKE Paul Krugboy apart

2011-08-29T16:33:00.002-04:00

Krugboy a "real" fake or just a fake fake? IT's extremely difficult as James Taranto points out thusly:

LONDON--We'll never forget where we were when the Great Virginia Earthquake of 2011 struck.

We were riding in a taxi in Cambridge. As this was the Cambridge Cambridge and not the Harvard Cambridge--we were there for a Templeton Foundation conference--we didn't feel any shaking, but we were monitoring our Twitter feed so we heard about it almost immediately. Some of our fellow conference-goers were from the Washington area; when we told them what had happened, they nervously phoned home to make sure all was well. It was.

Later that day, as HotAir.com reports, Fake Paul Krugman weighed in on the economic impact of the quake: "People on twitter might be joking," he wrote, "but in all seriousness, we would see a bigger boost in spending and hence economic growth if the earthquake had done more damage." Former Enron adviser Real Paul Krugman was furious at the "right-wing hacks" who had mistaken Fake Krugman for him, and at Fake Krugman for stealing his material. He offered this advice on how to tell Real Krugman and Fake Krugman apart:

If you see me quoted as saying something really stupid or outrageous, and it didn't come from the [New York] Times or some other verifiable site, you should probably assume it was a fake.
That means it was Real Krugman who wrote, on Sept. 14, 2001, that the terrorist attacks three days prior could "do some economic good" because "all of a sudden, we need some new office buildings," and "rebuilding will generate at least some increase in business spending." And it was the Real Krugman, as we noted in September 2010, who described World War II as "the miracle of the 1940s" because it entailed "government activism" that spurred an economic recovery.

On the other hand, since Fareed Zakaria's show is on CNN and not the Times website, it must've been Fake Krugman who told Zakaria earlier this month: "If we discovered that . . . space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months."

After reading FZ on the Middle East in his best-selling book of flimflammery, "Fake" would be a good substitute for "Fareed" Zakaria....!!! His rendition of events and facts on both Arab/Israel and Arabian Peninsula affairs are riddled with falsehoods and unforced errors.

Why Syria is more "Complicated" than Libya

2011-08-29T15:02:00.002-04:00

The WSJ has an article on Syrian WMD and long-range missiles as well as nerve gas and other agents of murderous intent.

"We are very concerned about the status of Syria's WMD, including chemical weapons," Israel's ambassador to the U.S., Michael Oren, said in an interview. "Together with the U.S. administration, we are watching this situation very carefully."

Israel has historically held concerns about the fall of the Assad regime, which has largely kept the Syria-Israel border quiet for the past 40 years. Still, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government has increasingly voiced support for democratic change in Damascus.

"We see a lot of opportunity emerging from the end of the Assad regime," Mr. Oren said.

A senior U.S. official said Syria's suspected chemical weapons arsenal "is of great importance and...under intense study."

U.S. and Israeli officials won't disclose exactly how they are keeping tabs on Syrian weaponry. But in the past, the U.S. and Israel have tracked activities at Syrian military installations using satellites and human spies. In 2008, the George W. Bush administration released detailed photographs and other intelligence of a reactor allegedly set to produce weapons-grade plutonium on the Euphrates River in eastern Syria.

Washington's concerns about Syria mirror in some ways those held about Libya, where U.S. intelligence agencies are trying to help rebels secure mustard gas, shoulder-fired missiles and light arms amassed by Col. Moammar Gadhafi's regime in recent decades. The Obama administration is concerned these weapons could fall into the hands of militant groups and terrorist organizations operating across North Africa and the Middle East.

During a short-lived détente with the U.S. that began in 2003, Col. Gadhafi gave up the equipment needed to develop nuclear weapons.

Mr. Assad's government has repeatedly denied that it has developed any nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. It accuses Israel of having developed the largest nuclear and chemical weapons arsenal in the Middle East, a charge Israel neither confirms nor denies.

Syria is one of six nations that isn't a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention, which bans the production and stockpiling of chemical weapons.

U.S. and Western intelligence services view Damascus as a central player in a global proliferation network that includes North Korea, Iran and the militant groups Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories.

U.S. officials believe North Korea has assisted both Damascus and Tehran in developing medium- and long-range missile systems. U.N. investigators also concluded in a recent report that Syria and Iran oversee sophisticated smuggling networks that move light arms and Katyusha missiles into Lebanon and the Palestinian territories via sea and land. Last year, the U.S. charged Syria with transferring long-range missile technologies to Hezbollah, a charge Damascus has denied.

Aside from the fact that ever since it lost the Golan Heights, Syria has kept to its signed agreements [although it has been assiduously using proxies to make lethal mischief against Israel from its Hezbollah and Hamas surrogates], there is a lot that Syria could do in a battle to the death or "Mother of All Battles."

A 2009 report by the Central Intelligence Agency said: "Syria has had a [chemical weapons] program for many years and already has a stockpile of CW agents, which can be delivered by aircraft, ballistic missiles and artillery rockets."

Current and former U.S. officials said Syria has at least five sites where it produces chemical-weapons agents, including mustard gas, Sarin and VX. Mustard gas is a blistering agent used extensively in World War I. Sarin and VX are nerve agents that are considered more lethal.

But the officials said these facilities are difficult to track as they are spread across Syria and centered in such cities as Damascus, Hama, Latakia and Aleppo. Some production facilities are at military facilities that also store Syria's Scud missiles.

U.S. officials said there are no indications that the Assad regime has transferred chemical weapons to Hezbollah or Hamas. They also stressed that there are no indications that any Syrian weapons facilities have been compromised or are vulnerable.

Still, U.S. officials said there are worries that this situation could change if Syria follows Libya into a period of prolonged unrest or civil war. There have already been reports of some Syrian military units splintering into pro- and antiregime elements, although the overall structure of the armed forces appears intact, U.S. officials said.

The level of U.S. concern about the stockpiles would grow should Syria descend into even deeper chaos or full-blown civil war, a U.S. official said. "That scenario is on the radar screen, and a lot of people are watching this closely, but we're not there right now," the official said.

Nonproliferation experts are particularly concerned that Syrian army units could be diverted away from guarding the weapons sites if the instability in the country continues. There are also fears that elements of the Syrian army could seek to sell artillery shells tipped with chemical or agents.

"The fear is fragmentation," said Leonard Spector, head of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, an independent think tank in Washington. "If you have a situation where the military fragments, or where some of the locations are overrun, then you have all these other contingencies you have to plan for."

The UN now knows that Syria was probably NOT complicit in the murder of Lebanese President Hariri [whom I met long ago in DC], but this hardly lessens the fear that a Syria spiraling out of control might not become a hornet's nest of opportunity for terrorist opportunists.

Early Obama Letter Confirms Inability to Write

2011-08-29T15:01:00.000-04:00

Early Obama Letter Confirms Inability to Write

Powerline seconds Jack Cashill's emotion that a letter that O'Bozo wrote in 1990 as an editor of the Harvard Law Review reveals his characteristic flimflammeries and is “patronizing, dishonest, syntactically muddled, and grammatically challenged.”

For more on how a Manchurian Candidate was foisted on the American People, read the whole thing:

Unaided, Obama tends to the awkward, passive, and verbose. The phrase "our concern in this area is most appropriately directed at any employer" would more profitably read, "we should focus on the employer." "Concern" is simply the wrong word.
Scarier than Obama's style, however, is his thinking. A neophyte race-hustler after his three years in Chicago, Obama is keen to browbeat those who would "even insinuate" that affirmative action rewards the undeserving, results in inappropriate job placements, or stigmatizes its presumed beneficiaries.
In the case of Michelle Obama, affirmative action did all three. The partners at Sidley Austin learned this the hard way. In 1988, they hired her out of Harvard Law under the impression that the degree meant something. It did not. By 1991, Michelle was working in the public sector as an assistant to the mayor. By 1993, she had given up her law license.
Had the partners investigated Michelle's background, they would have foreseen the disaster to come. Sympathetic biographer Liza Mundy writes, "Michelle frequently deplores the modern reliance on test scores, describing herself as a person who did not test well."
She did not write well, either. Mundy charitably describes her senior thesis at Princeton as "dense and turgid." The less charitable Christopher Hitchens observes, "To describe [the thesis] as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be 'read' at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language."
Michelle had to have been as anxious at Harvard Law as Bart Simpson was at Genius School. Almost assuredly, the gap between her writing and that of her highly talented colleagues marked her as an affirmative action admission, and the profs finessed her through.
In a similar vein, Barack Obama was named an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Although his description of the Law Review's selection process defies easy comprehension, apparently, after the best candidates are chosen, there remains "a pool of qualified candidates whose grades or writing competition scores do not significantly differ." These sound like the kids at Lake Woebegone, all above average. Out of this pool, Obama continues, "the Selection Committee may take race or physical handicap into account."
To his credit, Obama concedes that he "may have benefited from the Law Review's affirmative action policy." This did not strike him as unusual as he "undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action programs during my academic career."

Heather MacDonald on The Great Course

2011-08-28T23:18:00.002-04:00

The City Journal is the best reading around.

To open a Great Courses catalog is to experience an intellectual seduction. “When was the last time you read the classics of American literature?” teases one course description. “Possibly not as recently as you’d like. These carefully crafted lectures are your royal road to recapturing the American experience—and our intellectual and cultural heritage.” A course on Plato’s Dialogues—“for millennia the objects of devoted study by the noblest minds”—invites you to “become engrossed in the ‘romance of the intellect.’ ” The company uses words to describe learning—such as “joy,” “beauty,” “pleasure,” “classic,” and its favorite, “greatness”—that have long disappeared from the academy’s discourse. “As you read or reread these masterpieces, you will likely experience such joy from great reading that you may wonder why you have spent so much time on contemporary books,” asserts one course description, committing several transgressions against the reigning post-poststructuralist orthodoxy.

And the company offers a treasure trove of traditional academic content that undergraduates paying $50,000 a year may find nowhere on their Club Med–like campuses. This past academic year, for example, a Bowdoin College student interested in American history courses could have taken “Black Women in Atlantic New Orleans,” “Women in American History, 1600–1900,” or “Lawn Boy Meets Valley Girl: Gender and the Suburbs,” but if he wanted a course in American political history, the colonial and revolutionary periods, or the Civil War, he would have been out of luck. A Great Courses customer, by contrast, can choose from a cornucopia of American history not yet divvied up into the fiefdoms of race, gender, and sexual orientation, with multiple offerings in the American Revolution, the constitutional period, the Civil War, the Bill of Rights, and the intellectual influences on the country’s founding. There are lessons here for the academy, if it will only pay them heed.

The tenured clowns in academicide's cloacal tunnels are unlikely to do so.

Rollins, then 33, soon discovered that his assumptions about the university—that it existed, in his words, “to transmit to the young everything the civilization has figured out so far and to discover new things”—were not shared by everyone in the academy. “My first baptism came quickly,” he says. One of his earliest hires was Rick Roderick, a philosophy professor at Duke University, whom Rollins describes as to the left of Karl Marx. Nothing disqualifying there, so long as a professor injects his political views into a course only if relevant. Roderick had already recorded two popular courses for the company and was in the middle of his third when he let fly the observation that we shouldn’t bother to listen to anyone—Ronald Reagan came immediately to mind, he said—who scored too low on the “DQ index.” (That would be the “Dan Quayle index,” after the purportedly stupid vice president.) Roderick went on to speculate on tape that the only reason Nancy Reagan had ever had power was that she “gave the best head in Hollywood.” At this point, Rollins, who had considerable capital resting on the success of Roderick’s course, intervened: “Rick, I’m deleting this material.” Roderick coolly replied: “Tom, truth is a defense to libel.” Ultimately, the index stayed in; Nancy Reagan’s alleged source of power was out.

I'm sure perfesser Rick was one of the Dukie dolts signing the faculty complaint about the rape of a black stripper by the NOW NATIONAL CHAMPION Duke LaCrosse Team. The team members were exonerated as the stripper turned out to be as unreliable a witness as Dominique Strauss Kahn's accuser who turned tricks on the side.

An American literature course by two theory-drenched Ivy League professors provided another early learning experience. The professors made little effort to conceal their contempt for the presumed racism and sexism of their audience and of the authors they were discussing. Within a month of the course’s release, customers were calling the company to complain about the lecturers’ condescending tone. In an institution that would live or die according to its customers’ satisfaction, Rollins couldn’t afford to alienate his audience. He destroyed all the master tapes of the course, so that no further copies could ship out, even accidentally. “Teaching shouldn’t be an opportunity for a professor to get off his chest burning issues that no one would listen to except students,” Rollins says, sadder but wiser now about the academy. “People want to know what the field has discovered; they aren’t interested in your personal views.”

Of course, the old adage that academic politics is so bitter and vicious because it concerns matters so very unimportant can be extended to the tenured solipsistic fetishists spreading their own brand of silliness in the interest of attracting peer-reviewed morons to do the daisy chain of serial buggery that constitutes success in the world of academicide. Their bitter and vicious feuds are not above academic fraud, communally agreed upon, so all can peer review themselves into grants and other perquisites donated by equally venal and dishonest politicians. Anthropomorphic Global Warming is the most fitting example, but the cabal protecting this witless Obamandias Administration participates almost gleefully in perpetuating self-serving statistics and simply ignoring a much larger and more cogent-==but less politically correct---evidence. Their coverup of the civil war between ATF and the Border Patrol is just another example of the lamestream MSM's desire to destroy any semblance of American exceptionalism and turn us all into the mindless crones and drones they themselves have already become. Heather continues:

It's like intellectual crack.” The audience—mostly older professionals with successful careers—sees the liberal arts as a life-changing experience, observes Louis Markos, an English professor at Houston Baptist University who has recorded courses on C. S. Lewis and on literary criticism for the company. “They are hungry for this material.”

The company markets deftly to that hunger. The catalogs are learning opportunities in their own right, tantalizingly laying out the material that each course will cover, such as the contributions and foibles of the Renaissance popes. This peekaboo strategy presumes a burning desire for knowledge on the reader’s part. “Starting with the Renaissance, the culture of the West exploded,” begins the description of a Western civilization series. Then it irresistibly reels the reader in: “Over the next 600 years, rapid innovations in philosophy, technology, economics, military affairs, and politics allowed what once had been a cultural backwater left by the collapse of the Roman Empire to dominate the world. But how—and why—did this happen? How did the decentralized agrarian principalities of medieval Europe remake themselves into great industrial nation-states? How and why did absolutism rise and then yield to democratic liberalism?”

In promoting its wares, the Great Courses breaks one academic taboo after another. The advertising copy for “Books That Have Made History: Books That Can Change Your Life” asserts: “Beginning with the definition of a great book as one that possesses a great theme of enduring importance, noble language that elevates the soul and ennobles the mind, and a universality that enables it to speak across the ages, Professor Fears examines a body of work that offers an extraordinary gift of wisdom to those willing to receive it”—a statement so reckless that it would get its proponent thrown out of the Modern Language Association’s annual convention.Indeed, one could take the company’s definition of literature in another course description as a rebuke to the prevailing academic mores, not least in its very use of the word “literature” rather than the usual “text”: “While we sometimes think of literature as anything written, it is in fact writing that lays claim to consideration on the grounds of beauty, form, and emotional effect.” The Great Courses’ uninhibited enthusiasm is so alien to contemporary academic discourse that several professors who have recorded for the firm became defensive when I asked them about their course descriptions, emphatically denying any part in writing the copy—as if celebrating beauty were something to be ashamed of.

This collectivity of sham artists and scammers are truly ashamed of what the highest and farthest reaches of what humanity can attain and continue their reductivist rants that are "peer-reviewed" by peanut galleries of others infected with a similarl contagion. They not only rule the Groves of Academicide, but the Hills of Hollyweird and the Capitol Hill recently infested with a female crone/queen bee who carried a giant gavel in front of herself---Nancyboy, the Tranny.

The most striking thing about the Great Courses’ humanities curriculum, however, is how often the same thinkers appear across a large range of courses. The canon has been “problematized” in the academy, but it is alive and well in these recordings. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Paul, Erasmus, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton, Molière, Pope, Swift, Goethe, and others are foregrounded again and again as touchstones of our civilization. This repetition occurs not because the company is on a mission to resuscitate the canon but because customers want it. The insatiability of the demand for such courses surprises even the producers themselves. “We were reexamining the same material,” says Rollins, “and I kept wondering: ‘How can customers keep buying “Great Ideas of Philosophy” and “Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition?” ’ But people bought both. They wanted different takes on Kant, Socrates, and the Enlightenment.”

The ideal of excellence and the concept of quality is foreign to the legion of limpdicks and lamestreamers. Harold Bloom was almost tarred and feathered, then run out of the Groves of Academicide on a rail for his magisterial The Canon, a collection of his own selections of the greatest examples of Western Literature, with zero psychobabble & silly textual analysis. For the same reason, I am now reading Frank Kermode's published criticism of Romantic, Shakespearean, and chiliastic literature.

So totalitarian is the contemporary university that professors have written to Rollins complaining that his courses are too canonical in content and do not include enough of the requisite “silenced” voices. It is not enough, apparently, that identity politics dominate college humanities departments; they must also rule outside the academy. Of course, outside the academy, theory encounters a little something called the marketplace, where it turns out that courses like “Queering the Alamo,” say, can’t compete with “Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition.”

The Great Courses is by no means a theory-free zone; it even offers a course in canon formation. The title of another course, “Representing Justice: Stories of Law and Literature,” uses the mannered gerundial construction so beloved of theory-besotted academics—not surprising in a course built on the briefly trendy idea that law is a form of literature. But the incursions of identity studies and other post-sixties academic developments remain minimal—and are inevitably denounced by some customers on the company’s website. Overwhelmingly, the professors act as handmaidens to their subjects, laying out their material clearly and objectively, rather than avenging 4,000 years of injustice by unmasking the power relations supposedly hidden in a hapless text. Whitman College classics professor Elizabeth Vandiver notes in a course on Homer’s Iliad that ancient Greek culture was patriarchal, unlike the modern era. Seth Lerer, a literature professor at the University of California at San Diego, does not chastise Milton for sexism in the famous description of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost:
For contemplation he and valour form’d,
For softness she and sweet attractive grace,
He for God only, she for God in him.
If the Great Courses were a college, its students would graduate with a panoramic view of human accomplishment and the natural world. Their knowledge of the past would be bolstered with courses in ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, and Egypt; the early, high, and late Middle Ages; the Renaissance and the Reformation; Chinese, Russian, and African history; and modern European history, including the Enlightenment, Victorian England, and World Wars I and II. In science and mathematics, they could study cosmology, algebra, calculus, differential equations, quantum mechanics, chemistry, chaos theory, basic biology, probability, the history of mathematics, the great ideas of classical physics, and the science of consciousness. To understand how mankind has thought about human life, they could plunge into Aristotle’s Ethics, Plato’s Republic, medieval philosophy, Eastern philosophy, Nietzsche, Tocqueville, Voltaire, the philosophical underpinnings of capitalism, and modern philosophy since Descartes. In literature, they could read the Greek tragedies, Homer, the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, Shakespeare, the English Romantic poets, Mark Twain, the English novel, and masterpieces of Russian literature. Their appreciation of beauty could be enhanced by studying the Dutch masters, cathedral architecture, Michelangelo, Mozart’s operas and chamber works, northern and Italian Renaissance art, Wagner’s operas, the lives and times of Stravinsky and Shostakovich, and Beethoven’s piano sonatas, symphonies, and string quartets.

MacDonald expatiates at the end of her article, summing up the simple verities which the vampires of High Scholasticism regard with the same reverence as garlic and the Crucifix.

The biggest question raised by the Great Courses’ success is: Does the curriculum on campuses look so different because undergraduates, unlike adults, actually demand postcolonial studies rather than the Lincoln-Douglas debates? Every indication suggests that the answer is no. “If you say to kids, ‘We’re doing the regendering of medieval Europe,’ they’ll say, ‘No, let’s do medieval kings and queens,’ ” asserts Allitt. “Most kids want classes on the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, World War I, and the American Civil War.” Creative writing is such a popular concentration within the English major, Lerer argues, because it is the one place where students encounter attention to character and plot and can non-ironically celebrate literature’s power.

But the educational market works very differently inside the academy and outside it, and the consumers of university education are largely to blame. Almost no one comparison-shops for colleges based on curricula. Parents and children select the school that will deliver the most prestigious credentials and social connections. Presumably, some of those parents are Great Courses customers themselves—discerning buyers regarding their own continuing education, but passive check writers when it comes to their children’s. Employers, too, ignore universities’ curricula when they decide where to send recruiters, focusing only on the degree of IQ-sorting that each college exercises sub rosa.

Universities are certainly doing very well for themselves, despite ignoring their students’ latent demand for traditional learning. But they would better fulfill their mission if they took note of the Great Courses’ wild success in teaching the classics. “I wasn’t trying to fix something that was broken in starting the company,” Rollins says. “I was just trying to create something beautiful.” Colleges should replicate that impulse.

I hold a card naming me as an "Academic Associate" of the University of Chicago. I've taught at FIU and FAU. But my greatest pride is my ability to compare and criticize the humbuggeries of the present-day Shambolic twaddle of the Post-PostModerns such as Foucault and Lacan & their adoring cliques and claques of mutually incomprensible and uncomprehending dwellers of the Upper West Side of Unreality, the one mimicking the New Yorker cover of the view across the Hudson with the Left Coast a mere few kilometers westward. The cemetery of their theoretical humbuggery grows daily, but there's still plenty of room in the crypt.

NYT Buries the Lede on Syrian Unrest

2011-08-28T01:33:00.002-04:00

The NYT Should know better.
Beirut correspondent Nada Bakri's key point in her article today didn't come until the fifth and sixth paragraphs [in bold italics]:

Infused with new energy after watching the violent televised downfall of Libya’s longtime autocrat, thousands of Syrians poured into the streets of their own country after noon prayers on Friday and demanded the same fate for President Bashar al-Assad, residents and activists reported.

It was yet another show of defiance in Syria against the government of Mr. Assad, who has never hesitated to use deadly force to suppress the five-month-old uprising that has threatened his grip on power. The rebellion in Libya that sent Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi fleeing from his fortified enclave in Tripoli seemed to give the Syrian protesters fresh enthusiasm.

“Qaddafi is gone; it is your turn, Bashar!” demonstrators screamed, according to accounts relayed from Syria, which has banned most foreign news organizations from reporting inside the country. Others shouted, “Bye-bye, Qaddafi. Bashar is next!” and “Bashar, we don’t love you, even if you turn night into day!”

The Friday demonstrations, the last in the holy month of Ramadan, came as Russia and China, Syria’s allies, tried to foil a proposal by the United States and European nations to impose Security Council sanctions on Mr. Assad’s government for its crackdown. Russia introduced a rival resolution calling on Mr. Assad’s government to accelerate reforms, but making no mention of the tougher sanctions sought by the United States and its European Union allies.

Western diplomats criticized the Russian resolution as a tactical maneuver that was meaningless as a deterrent. Mark Kornblau, a spokesman for the United States Mission to the United Nations, said, “The regime’s violence has continued unabated, the international condemnation has grown louder and the Security Council’s response should reflect those realities.”

In a sign of Mr. Assad’s growing isolation, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the militant group Hezbollah, called on Syria to introduce reforms and said that the unrest there would have major implications on the region if not solved peacefully. The Iranian-backed Shiite group in Lebanon has been one of Mr. Assad’s strongest allies.

In previous remarks Mr. Nasrallah has always offered support for the Syrian leadership, and his group adopted the government version of events there: that it is battling foreign armed groups.

The reason that Nasrallah's backpedaling from full support lies in the fact that Hassan Nasrallah's Hezbollah is a wholly-owned subsidiary of its Iranian masters. If even the Iranians are getting cold feet, some sober reassessment is becoming necessary for Bashar Al-Assad and his allies.

If one reads the rest of the article, it is apparent that the Syrian snipers and killer-goons [who are responsible for all the shooting of Syrian soldiers who refuse to fire on the populace] are being held back in check. A few in the far east on the Euphrates at Deir Ez-Zeir obviously didn't get the memo and killed innocent demonstrators anyway.

Steve Jobs: The Most Brilliant Tyrant in Business History?

2011-08-27T23:30:00.005-04:00

CNN Money has a now outdated article from March,2008 which tries to evoke the human white-heat fireball which is Steve Jobs:

At Apple during his 20s, Jobs served as board chairman and head of the Macintosh division. But he was never given the CEO job. Adult supervision - in the form of professional managers - was recruited to run the fast-growing business, notably Pepsi president John Sculley. "Back then he was uncontrollable," venture capitalist Arthur Rock, an early Apple board member, told Institutional Investor last year. "He got ideas in his head, and the hell with what anybody else wanted to do. Being a founder of the company, he went off and did them regardless of whether it ended up being good for the company."

To be sure, many of the gifts that would drive Apple's resurrection over the past decade were already evident in the 1980s: the marketing showmanship, the inspirational summons to "put a dent in the universe," the siren call to talent. Engineer Bob Belleville recalls Jobs recruiting him from Xerox in 1982 with the words: "I hear you're great, but everything you've done so far is crap. Come work for me." Jobs famously seduced Sculley to Apple by challenging him: "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?"

But after two years of working closely with Jobs, Sculley came to liken him to Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. In "Odyssey," his memoir of this period, he called Jobs "a zealot, his vision so pure that he couldn't accommodate that vision to the imperfections of the world." In 1985, Sculley orchestrated Jobs' firing after a power struggle. And in his memoir, Sculley dismissed Jobs' vision for the company. "Apple was supposed to become a wonderful consumer products company," Sculley wrote. "This was a lunatic plan. High tech could not be designed and sold as a consumer product." Of course, Sculley was dead wrong.

Indeed, as the iPhone and iPad would go on to cement Jobs as the ultimate consumer product genius of all time, excepting only Henry Ford & Thomas Edison, perhaps, it seems that Jobs' ability to change his mind and take credit shamelessly was more in the line of Joe Stalin or Adolf, or a competent Saddam Hussein, in homage of his partly Middle East heritage {a Syrian daddy who disappeared from his life and adopted him out].

Here's the last revealing paragraph in a long article that spends 90% of its verbiage excoriating Jobs while lauding him as a genius:

Already in 2008, Jobs has unveiled his usual array of sleek new products, highlighted by the MacBook Air, billed as "the world's thinnest notebook." The company's most recent quarterly results were its best ever: Apple reported $1.58 billion in profit, $18 billion in the bank, and zero debt. Despite signs of a recession, the company projected second-quarter earnings growth of 29%.

But this time, all that just wasn't amazing enough. Since the beginning of 2008, Apple shares have tumbled by 40% from their all-time high in late December (in a down market, to be sure). Disappointing the masses is a risk you take when your stock is priced for bedazzlement.

And even for Apple, conjuring the magic won't get any easier. It's hard for a big company to keep growing rapidly, especially if the economy heads into a downturn. Cellphone makers - and even Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) - are cranking out new products to compete with the iPhone. The iPod market shows signs of being saturated. Amazon's (AMZN, Fortune 500) new digital-music store is gunning for iTunes, aided by record companies eager to escape Jobs' insistence on dictating the price for their content. It's the same reason NBC Universal took its shows off iTunes. Then there's the possibility of additional fallout from the SEC and Justice Department investigations at Apple and Pixar.

Apple voted most innovative
As usual, Apple's fortunes will rest not just on external factors, but on the shoulders of its CEO, who has pushed his company both to astounding heights and to the edge of significant risk. It is Steve Jobs himself who is the wonder - as well as the worry.

Read the whole article for a sort of Nantucket Sleigh Rod that comes from spearing a whale. And of course, the last paragraph doesn't even have a clue that Apple was about to invent the fastest selling "consumer product" in the history of IT. While Gates bathes in the bathos of his early retirement, Jobs invented iPad, which made Apple bigger than Exxon/Mobil for a short time last month and will put Microsoft into the dustbin of history that corporate second-raters deserve---Gates bet on a computer future based on big business while Jobs bet on a Brave New World that has changed the lives of all of us on a daily basis....!

Archduke Otto Von Hapsburg Dies at 98

2011-08-25T02:59:00.003-04:00

Death of a Emperor-Manque

Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote a long and masterful history of the Habsburg Dynasty which I finished reading about a year ago. My interest in HapsburgMitteleuropa has always been sustained by Robert Musil's book A Man Without Qualities, a sort of Proustian meditation on the "fictional" author of a supposed "0fficial" biography of the Hapsburg family and the 650th Anniversary of the foundation of what later became the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Musil has always been somewhat underappreciated.

My own reference to the Archduke Otto was that when only a young six-year old or so, I happened to "meet" this august personage in theMotherhouse of the School Sisters of Notre Dame of Milwaukee Province, located in Elm Grove, a leafy western suburb of Milwaukee where my Catholic grade school was located, just across the street from the imposing Victorian pile. I have a vague memory as the tallest and "smartest" first-grader in St. Mary's Elementary School of being among a few of the kids in the school to shake hands with the Prince, who counted the SSND as among the recipients of the patronage of his Hapsburg heritage, such as it was.

Later, in the Dept. of State, I learned of the minor, but somewhat influential role he played in attempting to set up a postwar European Christian Democratic Party, then beset by Cold War pressures. Subsequently, two decades later at St. Louis University, I met Kurt von Schuschnigg. the Austrian Premier evicted or suborned by Hitler's Anschluss in the Putsch of 1938. A decade after that, as an FSO I sat in conversation with Ambassador Neumann, freshly back from Afghanistan, who as a youthful student in Vienna in the thirties was a young socialist and asked him whether he'd ever crossed paths with Von Schuschnigg and he replied: "Yes, he had me sent to Dachau."

Talk about a conversation-stopping moment...!!! Anyway, the obituary of the Telegraph says:

Otto reached his 18th birthday and was duly declared, in a family ceremony with few outside guests, “in his own right sovereign and head of the house”.
However ghostly that title appeared, it was enough to impress the Austrian-born Adolf Hitler, who was manoeuvring to seize power in Germany. When in the winter of 1931-32 the young Pretender spent a few months studying in Berlin Hitler twice suggested a meeting.
The first invitation came from Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia, the dim-witted Nazi son of the exiled Kaiser, and the second via Goering himself. Otto refused both times on the spurious excuse that he had not come to Berlin to discuss politics (in fact, he was doing nothing but). Hitler was incensed by the snub and it touched off a six-year battle between the two men for the fate of their Austrian homeland.
The climax was reached in February and March of 1938 when a Nazi takeover in Vienna seemed imminent, prompting a short-lived show of defiance from the Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg — a monarchist at heart but without the strength of his convictions. His vacillation prompted a remarkably courageous offer from the young Pretender to return from exile to take over the reins of government in order to repel Hitler. Schuschnigg dithered but eventually rejected the idea — perhaps just as well for Otto, who was already high on the Gestapo’s wanted list.

Otto Von Hapsburg was one of the few survivors of a bygone age who managed to retain the Christian values of his long dynastic pedigree, and was most gratified when in 2004, his unhappy father Karl was beatified by Pope John Paul II. His son Karl had lost any political career possibilities because of a campaign funding scandal and although Otto remained a representative for Western Austria in the European Pariliament in Strasbourg, his death has ended the long participation of the Hapsburg Family in European political affairs.

Watts Up With That?

2011-08-23T13:38:00.005-04:00

The "Hockey Stick" Fallacy which propelled global warming hysterics back when it denied the entire MIddle Age Warming Period and a subsequent "Little Ice Age" which may both have been caused by sunspot variations has a new relative.

Check the link to see the number of "retractions" as the so-called peer-review process is becoming the latest variation of a hockey-stick graph.

[T]here were just 22 retraction notices that appeared in journals 10 years ago, but 139 were published in 2006 and by last year, the number reached 339. Through July of this year, there were a total 210 retractions, according to Thomson Reuters Web of Science, which maintains an index of 11,600 peer-reviewed journals.

Meanwhile, retractions related to fraud rose more than sevenfold between 2004 and 2009, exceeding a twofold rise traced to mistakes, according to an analysis published in the Journal of Medical Ethics. After studying 742 papers that were withdrawn from 2000 to 2010, the analysis found that 73.5 percent were retracted simply for error, but 26.6 percent were retracted for fraud. Ominously, 31.8 percent of retracted papers were not noted as retracted

For more info on retractions, go to http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2011/08/surging-retractions-in-scientific.html and see how the great God Science has feet of soft clay while the rains pour down upon it. Like Ozymandias or Obamandias, perhaps.

Watts Up With That?

2011-08-23T13:38:00.002-04:00

Bashar Al-Assad Next Tyrant to Fall After Qaddafi?

2011-08-22T06:16:00.002-04:00

Mike Totten has a short piece on the twisted maniac of Damascus.

Many hoped that Assad would turn out to be a reformer when he assumed Syria’s presidency after his father died in 2000. He promoted himself that way, and for a while, he looked halfway convincing. He’s an ophthalmologist, not a military officer; he’s a bit of a technology geek and an Internet addict; he spent several years in the United Kingdom, where his wife, Asma, was born. Even when the promised reforms failed to materialize and repression against dissidents was ramped up again, some blamed the regime’s so-called “old guard,” followers of Hafez al-Assad who were maybe, just maybe, in Bashar’s way.

The problem with that theory is that Bashar has been in power for more than a decade now, and he has handpicked those who surround him. “The basis for such arguments was Assad’s own public relations strategy,” Lebanese-American scholar Tony Badran writes in Foreign Affairs. “When Assad inherited power from his father in 2000, he adopted the ‘old versus new guard’ theme to cultivate his image as a reformer and bolster his legitimacy at home and abroad. For a brief period, he allowed dissidents to criticize corruption openly. But this so-called Damascus Spring was a cynical mirage. In the past decade, Syria has not seen a single meaningful act of reform.”

Even if he wanted to, Assad would have a difficult time reforming the system that he inherited—not because of a stubborn “old guard,” which doesn’t exist, but because of the nature of Syria’s sectarian demographics. He and his family are members of the Alawite minority, a religious sect that constitutes about 10 percent of Syria’s population. Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority has always considered the Alawites infidels. (The region’s Shia Muslims considered them infidels, too, until Lebanese cleric Musa Sadr issued a fatwa declaring them Shias in 1973 because doing so suited his political agenda at that time.) Between the First and Second World Wars, the Alawites had their own semi-autonomous state along the Mediterranean coast, just north of Lebanon, but it was absorbed into Syria shortly before the French left the region. The Alawites (including Bashar’s grandfather, Suleiman) loathed the idea of living as vulnerable minorities in a country with a Sunni majority. Since the French left the Alawites to their fate, some figured—perhaps rightly—that the safest thing they could do was conquer Syria and rule it themselves. They still believe that their battle for power is a fight for their very survival. No one should expect them to go quietly.

Oh, by the way. Imam Musa Sadr came to an unknown, but presumably bad, end when he visited Libya on a "goodwill" trip later in the seventies. The current [and soon to be publically castrated] monster of Tripoli, the egregious madman Qaddafi, presumably had him "disappear" during a trip into the Syrian desert. You can read all about it in a book called "The Missing Imam" written by none other than Fuad Ajami. [Presumably the always paranoid Colonel Qaddafi suspected Musa Sadr of having a "sinister" connection with the Sufi [and suspected closet Shi'ite] Senussi King Idris whom Qaddafi deposed in 1969 when this abortion staged a "Young Officers" Movement imitating Egypt's Nasser.

Now the jokes on the half-Jewish [on his mother's side] Qaddafi, who should use his "Right of Return" instantly or end up gloriously dead tout de suite.

Richard Pipes and The Russian "Menace"

2011-08-21T16:58:00.002-04:00

Richard Pipes is a great scholar of Russia, no matter what the sadly-deranged Solzhenitsyn said toward the end of his tormented life. Indeed, Russia doesn't pose a menace and Prof. Pipes doesn't think he does. Here he discourses with a WSJ reporter on the 20th Anniversary of the Dissolution of the USSR.

On the anniversary of the coup, you might expect to find a celebration under way at the house of the man who taught generations of Harvard students the history of the world's most powerful totalitarian regime. Especially someone who helped inform America's response to the Soviet military threat and served on the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan. Surely, this particular professor—still demonized in certain circles as the archetypal Cold Warrior or, sin of sins, a fantasist about Soviet military might—surely he is cackling with delight at the thought of how we beat the Sovs?

The dissolution of the Soviet Union was one of "the most important events of the 20th century," says Richard Pipes. But he says this while serenely sitting on the porch overlooking the sunlit lake by his summer home. This is a Cold Warrior at peace.

No wonder. Surveying the post-Soviet universe, he sees no threats of the old magnitude on the horizon. When it comes to new foreign powers, he says, "China is the only successor, but the Chinese don't have such world-wide aggressive intentions. For the Russians, for them to triumph, the whole world had to be communist. I don't think that is true of Chinese Communism. They are perfectly content to be a rich and powerful country, to have influence in their region, but I don't think they have any intentions to take over Africa, or Latin America or anything like that."

Of course, I helped my daughter navigate through a whole cottage-industry library of books denying that the US or, say, Pope John Paul VI, had anything to do with the dissolution of the USSR, which sort of imploded all by itself in the view of these Eurotards. Back then, Prof Pipes thought Russia had a bright future:

Despite all he knows about Russia's sad history, he was upbeat even about that country for a time after 1991, after the last Communist czar, Mr. Gorbachev, stepped down. "I was rather optimistic" for the Russian people, Mr. Pipes says. "I thought all the chains which had held them had broken and they are free. But it didn't happen."

By 2000, ex-KGB strongman Vladimir Putin was in charge, and along with launching a war in Chechnya (and other grim misadventures in the near abroad of the former Soviet Socialist Republics) he began rolling back new freedoms in Russia, eliminating the election of governors, taking over television networks, and reinstating a culture in which free-speaking journalists get murdered. It may seem odd to us that, in the face of re-oppression, Mr. Putin's approval ratings soared. But Mr. Pipes is not surprised.

"Russians like strong leaders, autocratic leaders: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Stalin. They have contempt for weak leaders, leaders who don't impose their will but who listen to the people. Kerensky, who was prime minister of the provisional government in 1917, is held in contempt because he was a democratic leader."

Lenin's "vengeance personified" and Stalin as a "pockmarked Caligula" [Quotes from Boris Pasternak] was much more amenable to the slave mentality that underlay the veneer of the Enlightenment that Catherine the Great, Potemkin, and Tsar Alexander I had managed to coat the sprawling Empire with.

This theory—received by many Russians as a Russophobic accusation that they have a slave mentality—has made enemies for Mr. Pipes, among them the late novelist and gulag survivor Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. While both men saw the moral horrors and mass human sacrifice that constituted Soviet Communism, they explained its origins very differently. "He said it was because Marxism was a Western idea imported into Russia," Mr. Pipes says. "Whereas my argument is that it has deep roots in Russian history."

That drove the nationalist Solzhenitsyn up a wall, judging by his reaction after Mr. Pipes mailed a copy of his book, "Russia and the Old Regime," to Solzhenitsyn in Switzerland in the mid-1970s.

"I never heard from him until two years later," Mr. Pipes smiles, "when he attacked me . . . saying I was a 'pseudo scholar.'"

Some things do not change. Earlier this month Prime Minister Putin described the United States as "a parasitic" country. But name-calling may be about the worst that Russia can do anymore, at least to the West.

But a tiny 5'5" strongman like Vlad The Empoisoner Putin does pose a danger to some:

"They do pose a threat to their ex-republics," Mr. Pipes says. "They have no problem with Central Asia, because those [states] are rather docile. But they can't reconcile themselves to the loss of the three Baltic Republics [Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania] and Ukraine and Georgia. I feel fairly confident that if Georgia or the Ukraine were to join NATO, as they would like to, the Russians would invade and destroy their independence. But to us they don't pose a threat."

Even so, Mr. Pipes says, the rise of China has presented the U.S. with an opportunity to nudge Russia toward the fold of normal European countries. "I don't admire President Obama in general and I don't like his foreign policy. He doesn't have a clear course," Mr. Pipes says. "If you liked, as I did, Reagan's foreign policy, then you can't like Obama's."

But he gives the president good marks for his choice of an adviser on Russia, Michael McFaul, and he judges the administration's so-called "reset" policy with Russia as an apparent success. "There are no conflicts right now," he points out, although "how much this is a result of Obama's policy and how much is a result of [Moscow's] fear of China and the desire to move closer to Europe and the U.S., I don't know."

Mr. Pipes says Russia is "obsessed" with how its neighbor's growth and progress threaten to make Moscow seem irrelevant on the global stage. "China is becoming a great world power. And that bothers them terribly. They're willing to have America the second great power but they are worried about China being a great power."

Mr. Pipes notes that when foreigners visited Russia in the 17th century, Russians would boast—fairly accurately as it turns out—that their country was the same size as the visible surface of the moon. It still is, although an eclipse by China seems unstoppable. "What can they do about it? They cannot reduce Chinese exports to the United States, the Chinese accumulation of hard currency, the military buildup and so on."

Pipes does think that the only challenge for America today is confronting militant Islam, as does his son.

"The communists were not fanatics. They were vicious people, but you could reason with them . . . and when the going got tough, they retreated." For instance, he says, "You had the Cuban missile crisis: Castro wanted the Russians to actually launch a nuclear attack on the United States, and he said 'OK, Cuba will be destroyed but socialism will triumph in the world.' And Khrushchev said no, nothing doing."

The communists "were never suicidal," either, Mr. Pipes adds, "and the ordinary Russians . . . they wanted to live. So this is a different danger. It's not as bad as the communist danger was because they don't [control] the arsenals of power, of military power. But they are fanatical, and they are irrational. We have to stand up to them and not be frightened of them. But we may be in for decades of the Muslim threat."

The Castro anecdote is true as far as can be determined. The bearded madman actually believed a nuke attack on the USA would be victorious, having actually bit on JFK's fallacious campaign rhetoric about a "missile gap." And if Cuba would be vaporized, he would be the posthumous hero of the victory of Communism..... This was about the time he sent his Argentine deputy Che Guevara to Latin America after losing too many rounds of golf with the upper-middle class Che. [Golf was subsequently banned until recently, for reasons having to do with Cuba's "Caro Lider"]

As for defeating the last known enemy of world peace, Mr. Pipes gives credit to America's policy of containment, which held communists back in most places until the Soviet Union began an inevitable decline. But it might have lingered for decades longer if not for a big push. "Ronald Reagan contributed mightily to the collapse of the Soviet Union," he says. "It would have happened eventually, but not as soon as it did. Because he understood what communism was and how unnatural it was."

Another lesson is "that you should not give in for practical reasons to evil, which we had done for many years under détente and so on. We gave in and we treated these people not as crooks and criminals but as worthy partners. And this was a mistake, they were not. And history has proved it. Not to everyone, of course."

Partly he's referring to scholars, in his own and related fields, with whom he sparred for decades about the nature of the enemy. "In general, the profession in this country, they were not pro-communist but they thought—and that is why I had quarrels with them always—that the [Soviet] system was popular and that it would be there forever. Ergo we have to get along with them, which means we have to make concessions and live with them, and not attack them the way I wanted to attack them, or Reagan wanted to attack them. I mean Reagan, whom they thought a dummy, said this: The Soviet Union is going to collapse. And they said ridiculous, he doesn't know what he is talking about—and he was right."

So Mr. Pipes has been vindicated too? "Yes, of course. But they don't admit it," he laughs. "They have done no self-analysis asking: Where did we go wrong? And they just merrily go on."

The Groves of Academe bear bitter fruit which is frankly inedible.

More than once, Mr. Pipes refers to a woman he met in Russia in the 1960s, when he was visiting Leningrad and she was assigned as his driver. She had lost her husband in the war, felt utterly alone and "looked worn out." He tried to comfort her, he says, with words like, "'Don't give up. You are young, you will find a husband, you will find a family.' And I'll never forget her answer," he recalls with what looks like a shudder: "What do you know? You live in paradise."

Mr. Pipes seems a happy man today. Even the faltering U.S economy—whose former vigor played such a role in the Cold War victory—hasn't got him down. "I have been through these recessions before. If you're my age and you've been through Hitler and Stalin, nothing frightens you. . . . Who's going to frighten me, [Hugo] Chávez?"

The one aspect that Prof Pipes might have mentioned was that Russia's gigantic ten-time-zone sprawl across the planet impinges into territories formerly, if only sometimes briefly, by the Great Middle Kingdom when China ruled everything east of the Urals, through the Golden Horde and even saw Genghis's descendents destroy Baghdad in 1258AD.

Would a prosperous and growing population of Chinese ever look north to relatively unoccupied Eastern Siberia, while Russia's own population is effectively diminishing through emigration and early mortality? No one seems to address that contingency, although it could come up sooner or later.

Unrepentant Commie Hobsbawm Still a Psycho After All these Years

2011-08-20T07:25:00.002-04:00

This Book Explains Why Yobs & Criminals Should Rule the World

The WSJ has an article on Eric Hobsbawm, who is now silly at age 94---just as he has been all his life. I happen to be reading Tony Judt's Reappraisals which has a chapter on EH called "Eric Hobsbawm and the Romance of Communism." Here's Judt on EH:

"There are certain clubs," he has said, "of which I would not wish to be a member." By this he means ex-Communists. But ex-Communists---Jorge Semprun, Wolfgang Leonhard, Margarete Buber-Neumann, Cklaude Roy, Albert Camus, Ignazio Silone, Manes Sperber and Arthur Koestler---have written some of the best accounts of our trerrible times. Like Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and Havel (whom Hobsbawm never mentions), they are the twentieth century's Republic of Letters. By excluding himself, Eric Hobsbawm has provincialized himself. [I would have included Whittaker Chambers' impassioned Witness among those representatives of the Republic of letters. Eds note!] [p. 123, Reappraisals

Tony Judt then does an entomolygists' excellent job of dissecting and then pinning this insect to the glass-enclosed mortuary where EH & his fellow fools belong. The WSJ does a good job at embalming this living fossil:

To his critics, his ideological dogmatism has made him an untrustworthy chronicler of the 20th century. The British historian David Pryce-Jones argues that Mr. Hobsbawm has "corrupted knowledge into propaganda" and is a professional historian who is "neither a historian nor professional." Reading his extravagantly received 1994 book, "The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991," the celebrated Kremlinologist Robert Conquest concluded that Mr. Hobsbawm suffers from a "massive reality denial" regarding the Soviet Union.

In "How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism," Mr. Hobsbawm's latest attempt to grapple with Karl Marx's legacy of ashes, the author remains an accomplished denier of reality. Drawn from essays and speeches spanning the past 50 years, Mr. Hobsbawm's book ruminates on pre-Marxian socialism, the works of the Italian communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, and a slew of internecine ideological battles that will be of interest mainly to academics and unreconstructed militants.

The more recent material in "How to Change the World," written after the fall of the Soviet Union, claims that regimes self-identified as Marxist shouldn't be allowed to sully the reputation of Marxism—despite all the statues of Marx that once dotted the communist world, the constant invocations of "Das Kapital" and "The Communist Manifesto," and the savage collectivization schemes.

The Wall Street Journal goes on to do a less subtle job of unmasking this impostor than Tony Judt did, but with an apologist for the mass murders committed by Stalin, Chairman Mao, Pol Pot and the currently starving subjects of Kim Jung-Il, subtlety isn't an appropriate tool. A good old-fashioned shillelagh or baseball bat such as those employed by his followers in the UK plundering and looting last night is a good weapon to employ on this intellectual criminal.

For anyone who has visited an American college campus in the past half-century, Mr. Hobsbawm's core argument will be familiar: The Marxism practiced by Lenin, Stalin and Mao was a clumsy misinterpretation of Marx's theories and, as such, doesn't invalidate the communist project. True, the East Bloc societies practicing what was called "actually existing socialism" (which Mr. Hobsbawm determines, ex post facto, didn't actually exist) ended in economic disaster, but experiments in "market fundamentalism also failed," he says. It is unclear to which "fundamentalist" governments he is referring, but it's important for Mr. Hobsbawm to establish a loose moral equivalence between Thatcherism and the ossified economies controlled or guided by Moscow.

One wouldn't know it from "How to Change the World," but Mr. Hobsbawm wasn't always convinced that the Soviet Union, along with its puppets and imitators, was misunderstanding the essence of Marxism. He never relinquished his membership in the Communist Party, even after Moscow's invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Indeed, he began his writing career with a co-authored pamphlet defending the indefensible Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939. "To this day," he writes in his memoirs, "I notice myself treating the memory and tradition of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness." There was some ugliness in the socialist states occupied by Moscow, he admitted in 2002, but "leaving aside the victims of the Berlin Wall," East Germany was a pleasant place to live. Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?

In a now infamous 1994 interview with journalist Michael Ignatieff, the historian was asked if the murder of "15, 20 million people might have been justified" in establishing a Marxist paradise. "Yes," Mr. Hobsbawm replied. Asked the same question the following year, he reiterated his support for the "sacrifice of millions of lives" in pursuit of a vague egalitarianism. That such comments caused surprise is itself surprising; Mr. Hobsbawm's lifelong commitment to the Party testified to his approval of the Soviet experience, whatever its crimes. It's not that he didn't know what was going on in the dank basements of the Lubyanka and on the frozen steppes of Siberia. It's that he didn't much care.

So why is this apologist for Hitlerian genocide and "ethnic cleansing" getting knighted by a Queen obviously as obtuse as this criminal is guilty of "thought crimes" to use an Orwellian phrase? I guess it's EH's constant use of the phrase "need not detain us here or some such silly variation of his moronic thinking worthy of a Nancy Pelosi's "We have to pass the bill in order to see what's in it."

Readers of "How to Change the World" will be treated to explications of synarchism, a dozen mentions of the Russian Narodniks, and countless digressions on justly forgotten Marxist thinkers and politicians. But there is remarkably little discussion of the way communist regimes actually governed. There is virtually nothing on the vast Soviet concentration-camp system, unless one counts a complaint that "Marx was typecast as the inspirer of terror and gulag, and communists as essentially defenders of, if not participators in, terror and the KGB." Also missing is any mention of the more than 40 million Chinese murdered in Mao's Great Leap Forward or the almost two million Cambodians murdered by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge.

When the bloody history of 20th-century communism intrudes upon Mr. Hobsbawm's disquisitions, it's quickly dismissed. Of the countries occupied by the Soviet Union after World War II—"the Second World War," he says with characteristic slipperiness, "led communist parties to power" in Eastern and Central Europe—he explains that a "possible critique of the new [postwar] socialist regimes does not concern us here." Why did communist regimes share the characteristics of state terror, oppression and murder? "To answer this question is not part of the present chapter."

Regarding the execrable pact between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, which shocked many former communist sympathizers into lives of anticommunism, Mr. Hobsbawm dismisses the "zig-zags and turns of Comintern and Soviet policy," specifically the "about-turn of 1939-41," which "need not detain us here."

The WSJ writer wisely turns us to another writer who merits an entire chapter, this one totally approving, in Judts's Reappraisals: Judt's Chapter following Hobsbawm's tomfoolery is entitled: "Goodbye to All That: Leszek Kolakowski and the Marxist Legacy [pp.129-146]

In one sense, Mr. Hobsbawm's admirers are right about his erudition: He possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of Marxist thought, specifically Italian communism and pre-Soviet socialist movements. But that knowledge is wasted when used to write untrustworthy history. Readers interested in a kaleidoscopic history of Marxist thought, its global influence and the reasons why regimes flying the red banner inevitably resorted to slavery and violence would be better served by Leszek Kołakowski's "Main Currents in Marxism." The three-volume classic (published in English in 1978 and in 2005 as a single volume) ably demonstrates that Stalinism is a feature of Marxism, not an aberration.

Mr. Hobsbawm closes "How to Change the World" by making a predictable admonition: With the world economy in turmoil, "once again the time has come to take Marx seriously." How the application of Marxist economics to the deeply indebted U.S. (or Greek) economy would reverse the current crisis is left unsaid. In Europe, where socialist parties and left-wing coalitions win elections, the electoral tide has turned dramatically in the other direction now that social-democratic policy has swamped the Continent in debt, with parties of the right controlling all of the major (and many minor) economies.

"How to Change the World" shows us little more than how an intellectual has committed his life not to exploring and stress-testing an ideology but to stubbornly defending it. The brand of Marxism that Eric Hobsbawm champions is indeed a way to "change the world." It already did. And it was a catastrophe.

Whenever a living fossil like Hobsbawm comes out of his kennel to bark at his mental masters, I recall the comment renowned Commie Berthold Brecht was heard muttering under his breath when the GDR's version of the Politburo followed the Berlin 1953 Labor Riots by workers unhappy living in their paradise with the admonition that "Perhaps the German People are not yet deserving of a Marxist/Leninist workers' paradise: Brecht muttered back a response "Well, then. Perhaps the GDR politburo should find itself a new population of compliant citizens..."

Karl Rove Created Rick Perry -- Now Can He Stop Him?

2011-08-20T02:42:00.001-04:00

Howard Fineman is descending to a level below former DNC hitpuppy Sidney Blumenthal, who had all sorts of nasty innuendoes in his repertoire, including unrequited homoerotic love by Alger Hiss for Whittaker Chambers in a New Yorker article in 1997 to Chambers getting old China hands sympathetic to Mao out of the way, preparing the brutish Dean Rusk for the Vietnam War to keep them commies out of Saigon. Fineman appears to want us to think that he understands Karl Rove's thought processes and projects his own fear and loathing of Gov. Perry, an actual leader who knows how to create jobs and eliminate government waste, onto Karl just as Blumenthal projected his own homoeroticism onto Chambers, or Hiss, or whatever target this sicko leftist degenerate conjured up in his fevered mind....if one can call a chamber of horrors like Sidney's brain-pan soup a "mind."

The left is scared into soiling its underwear in public by Perry's track record of success as the Rhetorical Genius retreats to his island snob-haven to conjure up some more job pixie-dust jive.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Midwest: Downfall as Destiny and The Fall of the Midwest Economy

2011-08-17T00:05:00.002-04:00

Michael Barone has been putting together the national Almanac of American Politics for several decades and knows more about the politics and economics of every CD than the NYT's editorial staff does about anything on political economy---period. When I got an MA in European History in 1969 from the U. of Michigan at Ann Arbor and joined the State Department in DC, I felt I was moving away from MoTown to the latest incarnation of Rome. Barone uses that year in his subtitle: "In 1970, the future seemed to belong to Michigan's example of big companies and big unions. Not Anymore."

To understand the political economy of the Midwest, it helps to put it in historic perspective. Originally the Midwest's economy was built on its farms, then later on its factories. The long farm-to-factory migration lasted from roughly 1890 to 1970. At the end of that period, when I was working on the first edition of "The Almanac of American Politics," it seemed there were two models for the U.S. future. One was the Michigan model, which prevailed in the industrial Midwest and the factory towns of the Great Plains. The other was the Texas model, which prevailed in most of the South and Southwest.

The Michigan model was based on the Progressive/New Deal assumption that, after the transition from farm to factory, the best way to secure growth was through big companies and big labor unions.

And Michigan wasn't the only Midwest state in this prosperous prospect:

The Big Three auto companies, economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote, could create endless demand for their products through manipulative advertising and planned obsolescence. The United Auto Workers would ensure that productivity gains would be shared by workers and the assembly line would never be speeded up. In those days, 40% of Michigan voters lived in union (mostly UAW) households, the base vote of a liberal Democratic Party that pushed for ever larger governments at the local, state and federal levels. You found similar alignments in most Midwestern states.

Liberals assumed the Michigan model was the wave of the future, and that in time—once someone built big factories and unions organized them—backward states like Texas would catch up. Texas liberal writers Ronnie Dugger and Molly Ivins kept looking for the liberal coalition of blacks, poor whites and Latinos that political scientist V.O. Key predicted in his 1940s classic "Southern Politics."

I can remember reading Dugger's "A Texan Looks at LBJ" and the serial plagiarizer Ivins back then and thinking how the backward hicks, oil barons, and railroad companies were beggaring Texas and the South, whose politics of race also kept them behind the economic curve:

History hasn't worked out that way. In 1970, Michigan had nine million people. In 2010, it had 10 million. In 1970, Texas had 11 million people. In 2010, it had 25 million. In 1970, Detroit was the nation's fifth-largest metro area. Today, metro Houston and the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex are both pressing the San Francisco Bay area for the No. 4 spot, and Detroit is far behind.

Adversarial unionism is one reason the Midwest slumped. It turns out that the 1970 assembly line, with union shop stewards always poised to shut it down, was not the highest stage of human economic development. When you make labor more expensive, you create incentives to invent new machines and create new jobs elsewhere. Foreign auto manufacturers built plants in a South recently freed from state-imposed racial segregation. With no adversarial unions, management and labor could collaborate and achieve quality levels the Big Three took decades to match.

I worked for COPE for a while in Ann Arbor, the agitprop arm of the UAW. The unions were always pushing the edge of the envelope and the new-economics development of the South first hit me when Schlitz opened another brewery in Longview, TX, free from the Milwaukee unions which made my eight-hours at the bottle house [I worked two summers for Schlitz] into only five & a half at the actual workplace---due to hour-long lunch breaks [with free beer]. two half-hour "breaks" and two fifteen minute "wash-ups" mandated into every day at the Bottle House, at that time the largest in the world. Barone expertly explains about the various flies in this idealized ointment:

One thing that those romantic about Midwestern farms and factories tend to forget is that people hated working in those unionized factories, just as the young Harry Truman hated working on his father's farm. That's why the UAW negotiated "30 and out"—retirement after 30 years—with GM in 1970. With workers retiring well before Medicare age, the next union demand was the billions in retiree health-care benefits that more than anything else bankrupted the Big Three.

Michigan is an extreme example of what has afflicted the industrial Midwest. Big corporations were replaced by big government as the leading employer, and public-employee unions replaced industrial unions as the chief financiers of the Democratic Party. In effect, public-employee unions have been a mechanism by which taxpayer money, in the form of union dues, permanently finances a lobby with a vested interest in higher spending and less accountability. It's a lobby that's benefited from the Democratic Party loyalties of black voters, of Latinos in Chicago (the only large Hispanic presence in the Midwest) and of culturally liberal suburbanites.

This Midwestern model is unraveling before our eyes. The Midwest has not been hit as hard by foreclosures or unemployment as some other places, with Michigan an exception on both counts, but you have to look hard for green shoots of growth. They may be most evident in North Dakota, where low costs and light regulation have produced booms in energy and high tech

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Now that Michigan has turned into a mini-Greece with no one paying taxes and everyone vying for faineant no-work government jobs, those who retain the old-time values that brought the hard-working Northern Europeans to the Midwest farmsteads are again asserting themselves. My native state of Wisconsin is a leading example:

But amid the recession, Midwestern Obama Democrats and their public-union allies lost their hold on voters in almost every Midwestern state, losing five governorships last year, including Iowa, and winning the Illinois and Minnesota governorships by less than 1% of the vote. A region that voted 54%-45% for Barack Obama in 2008 voted 53%-43% Republican for House candidates in 2010.

The repudiation of the Midwestern model has played out most dramatically in Wisconsin, where government unions were recognized in 1959. On the streets of Madison—a small city dominated by state government and a giant state university—liberals demonstrated against Gov. Scott Walker's reforms. Ludicrously, they depicted public employees as an oppressed proletariat and they proved ready to break the law with violence in the streets and casuistry in the courts.

Despite the unions' huge financial advantages, Gov. Walker's Republicans held on to their majorities in the state Supreme Court and state Senate in hard-fought judicial and recall elections. The political balance in Wisconsin and the Midwest generally looks more like 2010 than 2008.

Obamandias has today come forward with a $500 billion government program to promote biofuels, basically ethanol that is made of corn which raises the cost of feed for cattle and sheep and also costs more to make than fossil fuels. The US is the Saudi Arabia of coal, the Qatar of natural gas, and this retarded buffoon in the Oval Office wants to throw money at more ethanol production? But Barone ends the piece in the WSJ much better than I just did:

So what does the president have to offer the Midwest? The idea that the wave of the future is an ever-larger public sector financed by a more or less stagnant private sector looks increasingly absurd. The Midwest's public sector has, as Margaret Thatcher put it, run on "other people's money." Meanwhile, Mr. Obama's trip to the Midwest has been preceded by Texas Gov. Rick Perry's foray into Waterloo, Iowa. Mr. Perry points out that his state, with low taxes and light regulation, has been producing nearly half of America's new jobs. The Texas model may be sweeping the Midwest, not vice versa.

The only thing that Obama can make us think of looking forward to is double-digit unemployment and a devaluated country.