Such is the state of Obama’s America that a dismaying number of people think that banning ATMs would be good for the economy. It’s the new Luddism, led by the Ignoramus-in-Chief.
Fanny And Freddy
I’m not a big David Brooks fan, but he takes the political class to task much more than he’s usually willing to in today’s column.
Morgenson and Rosner write with barely suppressed rage, as if great crimes are being committed. But there are no crimes. This is how Washington works. Only two of the characters in this tale come off as egregiously immoral. Johnson made $100 million while supposedly helping the poor. Representative Barney Frank, whose partner at the time worked for Fannie, was arrogantly dismissive when anybody raised doubts about the stability of the whole arrangement.
Most of the people were simply doing what reputable figures do in service to a supposedly good cause. Johnson roped in some of the most respected establishment names: Bill Daley, Tom Donilan, Joseph Stiglitz, Dianne Feinstein, Kit Bond, Franklin Raines, Larry Summers, Robert Zoellick, Ken Starr and so on.
Of course, it all came undone. Underneath, Fannie was a cancer that helped spread risky behavior and low standards across the housing industry. We all know what happened next.
The scandal has sent the message that the leadership class is fundamentally self-dealing. Leaders on the center-right and center-left are always trying to create public-private partnerships to spark socially productive activity. But the biggest public-private partnership to date led to shameless self-enrichment and disastrous results.
It has sent the message that we have hit the moment of demosclerosis. Washington is home to a vertiginous tangle of industry associations, activist groups, think tanks and communications shops. These forces have overwhelmed the government that was originally conceived by the founders.
The reckoning started last November, but the real one is yet to come.
The Perfect Dem Ticket For 2012
Stagflation May Be Here
You don’t say. Unexpectedly! too…
As Glenn often says, a repeat of Carter is a best-case scenario.
[Update a few minutes later]
Really? You don’t say. Stagflation creates a dangerous position for the economy.
The Next Senator From Texas
…looks like a huge improvement over the one he’ll be replacing:
Before earning a Harvard law degree magna cum laude (and helping found the Harvard Latino Law Review) and clerking for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Cruz’s senior thesis at Princeton — his thesis adviser was professor Robert George, one of contemporary conservatism’s intellectual pinups — was on the Constitution’s Ninth and 10th Amendments.
Then as now, Cruz argued that these amendments, properly construed, would buttress the principle that powers not enumerated are not possessed by the federal government.
I doubt if Kay Bailey even understands what those amendments mean, or why they’re in the Constitution at all. Good riddance.
A Rare Fit Of Sanity On The Hill
The Senate has finally voted to end ethanol subsidies. So what will happen in the House? And conference? And will the White House go along?
Must Be That New Civility I’ve Been Hearing About
A union leader Godwinizes a rally in New Jersey, right out of the gate.
[Friday morning update]
It’s hard to get good goons these days:
When people who are used to dealing with cave-ins, or ladles of molten metal, hit the streets, they’re putting those traits to work in an environment that’s probably less dangerous than the one they work in every day. That makes them pretty formidable.
In fact, it made them so formidable that they were able to put together unions solid enough to send the industries they depended on overseas, where labor was more tractable, because the bosses weren’t willing to face the headache of trying to get rid of the unions, and couldn’t afford to pay the wages the unions, with their toughness, had managed to extract.
But miners and steelworkers are one thing. When the public employees of, say, Wisconsin hit the streets, it looked more like a bunch of disgruntled DMV clerks and graduate teaching assistants, because, well, that’s what it was.
Though they displayed more creativity in signage than you might expect from steelworkers, overall, they brought pretty much the same work habits to their protests that they bring to their jobs. (Sleeping in the capitol? Pretty much what they do at the office.)
America’s DMV clerks aren’t known for toughness and dedication on the job, and it would be asking a lot to expect them to display such characteristics for the first time when they’re off the job.
As the author of the editorial would say in other contexts, heh.
Obama Supporters Try To Defend His Middle-East Policy
An epic fail:
Let’s consider this:
A. Britain, France, Italy, and Germany all announced they would vote against unilateral independence before Obama did anything. He didn’t twist their arms; they took the lead.
B. There is no evidence that Obama has tried to twist anyone’s arm in Europe on this issue. Quite the opposite, he’s tried to get them to endorse his program of: We’ll get Palestine independence real fast so they don’t need to go to the UN. In other words, it is an appeasement strategy.
C. No, he has not given “ultimatums”; he’s just said he’s against it and will vote against it. In saying that, he’s assuming that it will go to the UN. An ultimatum is when you threaten someone with serious consequences unless they give in. He has not done so.
D. “He knows Israel is [our] only ally in the Mideast.” This is the most interesting sentence of all. No public action Obama has taken demonstrates that in any way. We only have the ritual pro-Israel statements. And such things as continued good military relations are not expressions of Obama’s personal views, but of Defense Department policies and sheer inertia.
Unfortunately, failure doesn’t distinguish this policy from any of his others.
What’s Worse Than Iran-Contra?
The more than 2,000 weapons that the Obama Justice Department allowed to be delivered to Mexican narco-terrorist cartels are thought to have been used in the shooting of an estimated 150 Mexican law enforcement officers and soldiers battling the cartels. Two American law enforcement officers have also presumably fallen prey to these weapons, along with an unknown number of civilians on both sides of the border.
President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice has purposefully armed narco-terrorist drug cartels that have been accused of bombings, ambushes, mass murders, public executions, and the assassination of police, politicians, and civic leaders.
Obama’s Justice Department armed the enemy of our neighbor and ally, providing enough arms to equip ten infantry companies, or two battalions, of violent drug dealers.
What did the president know, and when did he know it?
In a world in which we didn’t have a corrupt Attorney General, there would be people being charged under the False Statements Act. I don’t know whether or not the Congress can impeach a cabinet officer, but if not, they should demand Holder’s resignation and threaten to impeach the president if he refuses.
[Update a few minutes later]
I should add that what makes this even worse was the apparent purpose of it — to falsely accuse American gun sellers of selling guns to the cartels to allow them to further restrict the right to bear arms of law-abiding Americans.
[Friday morning update]
This should end Holder’s tenure. But it probably won’t.
The Hundred-Year Starship Study
Clark Lindsey has been covering the DARPA teleconference.