Links and Minifeatures 2009 03 11 Wednesday

Deception at Core of Obama Plans

Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the "$2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we have already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 -- 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.

Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama's tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that's a matter of scale, not principle.

As Rahm Emanuel, Obama's chief of staff, has stated, "Never let a good crisis go to waste" Obama has used this crisis to cram at least 1.6 Trillion dollars in irrelevant Democratic patronage programs down our national throat.

If Obama Is Wrong, the U.S. Will Be Bankrupt

Then came his near-$4-trillion budget last week. It is a manifesto to usher in a new age of government activism that involves levels of borrowing and spending never before seen in the US and is a document of such staggering ambition and risk that even some of Mr Obama's Democratic supporters are suddenly beginning to feel a little queasy.

A keen poker player, Mr Obama is gambling not only his own presidency, but the future wellbeing of the country. If he pulls it off, they might find room for him on Mount Rushmore. If he fails, he could bankrupt the world's largest economy.

The problem is that he's wrong - testably verifiably historically wrong. These tactics have been tried before, and they failed miserably. In fact, they are the exact opposite of the only thing that has worked in the past. But cutting taxes doesn't feed Democratic special interest groups and Democratic electoral supporters.

Obama's fear-mongering

Numerous commentators, including me, have pointed to this never-waste-a-crisis mantra as ideological evidence that Obama's budget priorities are a great bait-and-switch. He says he wants to fix the financial crisis, but he's focusing on selling his long-standing liberal agenda on healthcare, energy and education as the way to do it, even though his proposals have absolutely nothing to do with addressing the housing and toxic-debt problems that are the direct causes of our predicament. Indeed, some -- particularly on Wall Street -- would argue that his policies are making the crisis worse.

Beware the Debt Star

Now You Own It, Mr. President

If Washington had a buck to spare, it still wouldn't stop at the top. But let's, for the sake of argument, concede that presidents trigger recessions. Well, then, we also must concede that nearly every initiative enacted in the first 50 days by the Obama administration has exacerbated what Bush started.

Isn't it too early to judge? It would be if Obama had not accelerated the timeline with his "ambitious" agenda, including the partisan trillion-dollar project masquerading as a stimulus bill and the deficit-busting budget. It would be if Obama had not worked early to support agenda-driven omnibus pork bills, job-killing cap and trade schemes, and union assaults on workers' rights, to name just a few of his priorities.

Health 'Reformers' Ignore Facts

The Democrats' case to expand government health care is so full of holes that passing it quickly is their only hope. If Americans slow down and ask questions, they will be hard-put to come up with answers.

The Great Pretender

Obama is a great pretender. He repeatedly says he's doing things that he isn't, trusting his powerful rhetoric to obscure the difference. He has made "responsibility" a personal theme; the budget's cover line is "A New Era of Responsibility." He says the budget begins "making the tough choices necessary to restore fiscal discipline." It doesn't.

The Anti-Stimulus Plan

These programs are not directed at the economic emergency, but are instead unrelated, enormous policy initiatives. They are not akin to the New Deal but to the Great Society initiatives of the mid-1960s, which were the outcome of a progressive worldview that wanted to change the character and role of government in American life. But the Great Society was not enacted in the midst of an economic crisis. It came in the middle of a lengthy and sustained period of growth and prosperity and was in part understood as a way to make use of the tax revenues flooding federal coffers. The kind of ambitious expansion of government Obama envisions requires similar economic growth.

The President Starts War on Business

Islam Should Prove It's a Religion of Peace

Many Muslims seem to believe that it is acceptable to teach hatred and violence in the name of their religion -- while at the same time expecting the world to respect Islam as a religion of peace, love and harmony.

Scholars in the most prestigious Islamic institutes and universities continue to teach things like Jews are "pigs and monkeys," that women and men must be stoned to death for adultery, or that Muslims must fight the world to spread their religion. Isn't, then, Mr. Wilders's criticism appropriate? Instead of blaming him, we must blame the leading Islamic scholars for having failed to produce an authoritative book on Islamic jurisprudence that is accepted in the Islamic world and unambiguously rejects these violent teachings.

Obama Politicizes Stem-Cell Research

Yesterday President Barack Obama issued an executive order that authorizes expanded federal funding for research using stem cells produced by destroying human embryos. The announcement was classic Obama: advancing radical policies while seeming calm and moderate, and preaching the gospel of civility while accusing those who disagree with the policies of being "divisive" and even "politicizing science."

Agree with Obama or You're an 'Ideologue'

The President has things precisely backwards. In a stem cell context, the "ideology" is that Science, the great abstraction that only really smart people understand, trumps competing considerations. What Science wants, Science deserves -- didn't you know?

The difference between destroying embryos for research and torturing "subraces" for medical knowledge a la Dr. Mengele is one of degree, not of kind. The last eight years we have found many workarounds and alternatives - more ethical ones - because federal funding was prohibited if you destroyed another life.

Economic crisis shows government isn't the answer

Far from demonstrating the demise of free enterprise, this long-running, deepening recession is revealing the limitations of government.

Government, in its various yet powerful incarnations, has been offering one fix after another since August 2007.

The more the Fed and Treasury have tried, the less sure they seem and the more nervous the money makers have become.

Q and O

He's precisely right - it wasn't a problem with lack of regulation or lack of legislation. It was a lack of proper regulatory oversight and a willful decision by legislators to ignore the building crisis coupled with government distorting the market and actually incentivizing risk taking far beyond that which is prudent that led us here. And now that they have us in this position, all of them, Greenspan included, are engaged in a flurry of finger-pointing and name calling at every one but the right ones. This wasn't a crisis which happened in just the last 6 months or 8 years. This one has been building for a while.

Putting Obama on the Couch

Well, I think I've figured it out: The White House, fatigued if not overwhelmed by the horrific economic crisis, may be suffering from a number of "cognitive biases" as identified by the burgeoning field of behavioral economics. This approach looks at the various flawed ways humans make choices in the real world vs. the "econ" world where supposedly we're all cool, calculating "rational agents."

It has been obvious to me from day one that Obama and his team have started with the answer they wanted, then figured out a way to justify it. Other people are starting to figure it out.

A Presidential Crisis of Competence

Less than two months into this administration, three things are clear.

First, its agenda is every bit as radical as many of us expected and feared. Based on President Barack Obama's supposedly unimportant past, there was every reason to believe that this would happen. That some Obama supporters are surprised is a "tribute" to a media elite that treated decade-plus relationships with radicals Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, and others as "distractions from the real issues," and to a McCain campaign that refused to treat Obama's candidacy as the threat that it was, and now is.

Second, despite strong signals that he is guiding the ship of state in the wrong direction, Obama and his administration have largely refused to bow to reality. Having triumphed in the presidential campaign with marketing and misdirection, they actually believe that voters gave them a mandate to spend hundreds of billions of dollars we don't have, and to bail out banks, companies, and homeowners without apparent limit. While the markets continue to beg to differ, Obama has been essentially indifferent.

The beauty of the modern era is that a President doesn't need intermediaries such as a "Kitchen Cabinet" (Roosevelt's name for his friends who guided him from outside of official positions) to find out what people think, or for a reality check. He can go onto the internet and find out.

But Obama doesn't want to hear that the Titanic is headed straight for that iceberg. That's the way he wants to go; therefore, that's the way we're going to go if he can cajole, trick, intimidate, shame or a combination of all available techniques into going along with his desires.

The "Man-Cession" Continues

If this disparity was the other way around, we'd never hear the end of it for all the feminist accusations of "Sexism!" and "discrimination!"