…bullied a CBS reporter. She’s like the anti-Dan Rather.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
The Wall Street Protesters
…have met the enemy, and it is they:
Wall Street was the enabler, but Main Street was the addict. Americans stopped saving as long as home prices rose; when home prices started to fall, they started saving again.
That is why the Wall Street protesters are foolish and petulant. American households levered a $6 trillion net inflow of foreign savings during the decade 1998 through 2007 into a bubble that benefited them far more than it did Wall Street. The impact of the bubble on the household balance sheet exceeds the growth in real-estate assets, moreover, because most small business expansion followed the housing bubble.
For fifteen years we rode a tsunami of foreign capital pouring into American markets. We didn’t save a penny. Why should we? Our home equity was our retirement account. Our smartest kids got MBAs and went to Wall Street derivatives desks. Engineering was for dummies. Home prices rose so fast that local governments swam with tax revenues and hired with abandon. Everybody went to the party. Now everybody has a hangover, especially the bankers. We thought we were geniuses because we won the lottery. Now we actually have to produce and export things, and we have to play catch-up. Our kids are competing with Asian kids who go to cram school and practice the violin in the afternoon. This isn’t going to be easy, and the sooner we decide to roll up our sleeves and get back to work instead of looking for bankers to blame, the better our chances of coming back.
They don’t want jobs. They just want paychecks.
Elizabeth Warren And “Liberalism”
Counterprotest
This is a pretty funny picture.
Does Stimulus Spending Work?
No one really knows, but probably not.
What I Saw At The Revolution
A report from the front lines:
In truth, those camped out in Zuccotti Park are running a commune more than a protest. They have established a small communitarian village, which is punctuated by a small cabal of the angry, the insane, and the ignorant. Nothing I have seen is representative of a serious movement, and even less is indicative of any substantive thought. John Maynard Keynes is nowhere to be seen; instead, Occupy Wall Street has become an irresistible magnet for performance artists with generic grievances, and those who consider Stéphane Hessell’s absurd pamphlet, Indignez vous!, to be a serious rallying cry. So prevalent are these types, in fact, that a significant portion of those in attendance might as well be wearing t-shirts announcing, I’m Only Here For The Drum Circle And Organic Arugula.
As he says, they’re not the 99%. They’re not even the one percent.
[Update a while later]
The children of la revolucion are eating their own.
Groundhog Day
Guy Benson reports on the president’s latest press conference, so you don’t have to have had to suffer through it:
In summary: Pass this bill. It’s paid for. Republicans have no ideas. Mitch McConnell controls Congress. Independent economists love it. Millionaires and billionaires. Fair share. Not my fault. Japanese Tsunamis. I didn’t know. Bush. Pah-kee-stahn. Pass this bill.
What is it he wants us to do with the bill again?
No Silencing At CBS
Sharyl Attkisson has a reassuring tweet about her Fast’n’Furious coverage.
The Socialist Dream
…never dies. It’s unfortunately a basic feature of human nature that requires logic to overcome, and it’s a battle for every generation.
Why The Libyan Intervention Was Such A Disaster
Because it’s likely to prevent an intervention where it really matters:
If we are going to bomb Syria, it will have to be the way we bombed Serbia, or worst case the way we invaded Iraq: with cheaper, lower grade holy water sprinkled by the less sacrosanct NATO priests on the bombs as in Serbia, or with just some Potomac water hastily and unconvincingly sprinkled by Pentagon chaplains on the bombs as in Iraq.
But for the foreseeable future, as long as he is reasonably discreet and possibly even if he isn’t, President Assad can murder as many of his subjects as he wants with no fear that the UN will do anything about it. We stopped a relatively small scale massacre in a country that posed little threat to our interests (and from which we were getting some excellent intelligence cooperation I am told) at the cost of enabling what looks ultimately like a much larger bloodbath in a country where our vital interests are much more engaged, and whose government actively supports some of our most dangerous enemies in the region.
As Glenn often says, a replay of the Carter administration is a best-case scenario.