Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Heckuva Job, Timmy!

10 Comments

He managed to talk down the dollar. It’s like he doesn’t even care about it, or US sovereignty in general.

Can someone remind me again why this tax cheat (who is now in charge of the IRS) is “indispensable”?

[Thursday morning update]

More thoughts from Jim Lindgren.

[Bumped]

[Update a few minutes later]

“I wish the Admin could bring back the days when Joe Biden had sole possession of the gaffe-o-matic.”

A commenter makes the point of what is so worrisome about this:

I’ve been following the currency issue for years, and repeatedly over the past 10-15 years, the Saudis, Iranians, Russians and others have been pushing for an alternative reserve currency. The prime reason is mistrust of the United States fiscal policy.Now the Chinese, our largest creditor, have joined the chorus. Frankly, the only thing saving the dollar right now is that no one trusts any of the other major currencies.

It really doesn’t matter what Yglesias says or does, the global markets are speaking. Obama and Geithner are now “welcoming’ such a discussion. Basically we are looking at the downfall of the dollar similar to that of the Pound Sterling back in the 1970’s. The sun is setting on American economic leadership unless the grown ups act responsibly. To me, this is economic treason.

And the treason is not in going along with a second reserve currency per se, but in making it seem necessary to much of the rest of the world due to insanely reckless fiscal policies that are debauching the dollar.

[Update late evening]

Welcome, Instapundit readers. I’m glad that Glenn linked this post, but it’s not the one that I sent him (which means that he looked over the rest of the site and picked it out). Anyway, you might want to do the same.

Political Commentary

Credit Where It’s Due

3 Comments

I agree, I liked this Obama comment:

Q: Yours is a rather historic presidency. And I’m just wondering whether in any of the policy debates that you’ve had within the White House, the issue of race has come up, or whether it has in the way you feel you’ve been perceived by other leaders or by the American people. Or has the last 64 days been a relatively colorblind time?

OBAMA: I think that the last 64 days has been dominated by me trying to figure out how we’re going to fix the economy. And that’s — affects black, brown and white. And, you know, obviously at the inauguration I think that there was justifiable pride on the part of the country that we had taken a step to move us beyond some of the searing legacies of racial discrimination in this country. But that lasted about a day — (laughter) — and, you know, right now the American people are judging me exactly the way I should be judged, and that is are we taking the steps to improve liquidity in the financial markets, create jobs, get businesses to reopen, keep America safe. And that’s what I’ve been spending my time thinking about.

Too bad so many of his underlings and fellow Democrats don’t agree.

General Science, Mathematics, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Freeman Dyson

9 Comments

There’s a very interesting (and long) profile over at New York Times magazine:

Dyson is well aware that “most consider me wrong about global warming.” That educated Americans tend to agree with the conclusion about global warming reached earlier this month at the International Scientific Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen (“inaction is inexcusable”) only increases Dyson’s resistance. Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology and has a withering aversion to scientific consensus. The Nobel physics laureate Steven Weinberg admires Dyson’s physics — he says he thinks the Nobel committee fleeced him by not awarding his work on quantum electrodynamics with the prize — but Weinberg parts ways with his sensibility: “I have the sense that when consensus is forming like ice hardening on a lake, Dyson will do his best to chip at the ice.”

Dyson says he doesn’t want his legacy to be defined by climate change, but his dissension from the orthodoxy of global warming is significant because of his stature and his devotion to the integrity of science. Dyson has said he believes that the truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won’t come to pass. In “Infinite in All Directions,” he writes that nature’s laws “make the universe as interesting as possible.” This also happens to be a fine description of Dyson’s own relationship to science. In the words of Avishai Margalit, a philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study, “He’s a consistent reminder of another possibility.” When Dyson joins the public conversation about climate change by expressing concern about the “enormous gaps in our knowledge, the sparseness of our observations and the superficiality of our theories,” these reservations come from a place of experience. Whatever else he is, Dyson is the good scientist; he asks the hard questions. He could also be a lonely prophet. Or, as he acknowledges, he could be dead wrong.

But he’s got a pretty good track record.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Restoring The First Amendment?

2 Comments

Could SCOTUS be prepared to overturn McCain-Feingold, six years late?

I hope so. Supporting it was one of Sandra Day O’Connor’s more boneheaded decisions, and I hope that replacing her with Alito makes the difference.

I’ve always thought that George Bush’s signing the thing was an impeachable offense, since he took an oath to uphold the Constitution, but freely admitted that he was signing a bill that he viewed as unconstitutional. He was supposed to do his job, not kick it upstairs to the court and hope they’d do theirs.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Alice In Wonderland Continues

27 Comments

If the problem was too little regulation, then why are the unregulated institutions being used to bail out the regulated ones?

I wish that someone had asked the president that question last night. And here’s another missed opportunity — if the solution to our problem is nationalizing health care, why is Europe, where they did that years ago, having the same problems we are?

[Update a couple minutes later]

Here are some more questions that should have been asked last night:

Mr. President, a staple of Democratic party rhetoric over the years is that the GOP is the party of big business and the Democratic party is the party of the working man. Yet it would appear to the casual observer that Wall Street banks have hijacked your administration and are moving heaven and earth to socialize their staggering losses. Do you find it worrisome that Republicans are now increasingly inclined to argue that what’s good for Citigroup is not necessarily good for America, reversing the long-established rhetorical order of the political universe? And how comfortable are you with your progressive allies who are now wondering aloud about an administration that argues that bankruptcy is only an option for “the little people”?

We may not have the best government that money can buy, but we definitely have one that money can buy.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s an excerpt from the Barone piece that I’ve been thinking about for a while:

Democrats like Barack Obama and Barney Frank, at least on the campaign trail or in sound bites, have portrayed the financial crisis as the product of deregulation. The solution, they say, is more regulation. In that vein Frank, one of the brainiest members of Congress, is proposing that the Federal Reserve become a regulator of systemic risk, with the power to regulate firms that because of their size or strategic position are of systemic importance.

My American Enterprise colleague Peter Wallison has argued powerfully that this is a bad idea. Neither the Federal Reserve or other regulators identified the systemic risk which caused this crisis. Neither did most financial institutions or investors. Systemic risk is hard to identify for the very reason that it is systemic: It results from just about everyone doing what turns out to be the wrong thing. (Housing prices will always go up, therefore there is no risk in buying mortgage-backed securities, etc.) Identifying some firms as posing systemic risk is saying that they are too big to fail, in which case they’ll take undue risks and end up having to be bailed out by the government. These strike me as very strong arguments.

I would have a lot more confidence going forward if the people running things now weren’t the same people who didn’t see this coming (and in the case of Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, and Charles Schumer, partially responsible for it). Why not put Peter Schiff in charge? He’s one of the few who actually called it far ahead of time. Of course, the last thing that this administration wants is someone who actually understands economics.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Hookers And Congressmen

6 Comments

…and staying bought. Some thoughts from Glenn Reynolds:

it wasn’t just AIG: Wall Street in general gave profligately to Barack Obama, and to Democrats generally, in 2008. Yet now, when the polls shift, all of those politicians who were so happy to take the cash are suddenly pretending they have never even heard of Wall Street. Instead they’re getting behind punitive taxes, protesters steered to executives’ homes and what both the Financial Times and the New York Daily News have called a “witch hunt” against bankers and brokers.

As Joseph Nocera wrote in the New York Times, “Congress, with its howls of rage, its chaotic, episodic reaction to the crisis, and its shameless playing to the crowds, is out of control. This week, the body politic ran off the rails.” They probably acted nicer when they were asking for money just a few months ago.

If these donations had been given out of love and admiration, Wall Street donors would have reason to feel jilted. But if–as is generally the case with political donations–they were more in the order of protection money, then Wall Street donors may instead feel duped. They might want to ask themselves what protection, exactly, they got for their investment.

And more from Jonah Goldberg:

The Democrats were whorish in their quest for AIG money. But once the money stops flowing and the neighbors are watching, the Democrats suddenly pretend they never wore the naughty librarian outfit for their Wall Street Johns.

As Glenn says, it might be refreshing to see businessmen support politicians who support free markets. Some do, but too many don’t. Because we’ve let the government get out of control, they get far too much financial leverage from their political contributions. As Glenn notes, when an investment in a politician has a much higher payoff than an investment in (say) plant, the country has gone far off the rails from what the Founders intended.