The Other McCain

Monday, February 9, 2009

The salty-sweet taste of Hope

Take the "ournal" out of "journalism" and it's all over the faces of the White House press corps:

Chip Reid of CBS sounded like he wanted a job in the administration . . .

Yeah, let's hope there's some money in that "stimulus" for a fresh supply of knee pads for those tingly-legged reporters. This is the steamiest R-rated "honeymoon" in presidential history. Michelle Malkin:

President Obama’s lucky he didn’t slip and fall from the drool flood.

Oh, don't worry, the cult brides will clean up the mess, then fix their Dear Leader a pot of coffee and bake him some cupcakes with pink icing for Valentine's Day.

Doom and gloom alert

UPDATED & BUMPED 10:20 p.m.: There is sort of a false-dilemma fallacy that's mucking up arguments about government economic policy lately, and I'll tee it up by quoting something that Matt Cooper Twittered tonight:

Strong opening statement explaining the problem and why stimulus will help. Best line: "Tax cuts alone can't solve our economic problems."

Allow me to go long here a bit, because this is important. We just had a once-in-a-lifetime wipeout in the financial markets. If you talk to smart economists, off the record, you understand that the bursting of the real-estate bubble was not just a normal hump in the business cycle. It was more like the Mother Of All Corrections, a Drudge-siren alert that the fundamentals of our economy had gotten waaaay out of whack.

When the Good Times go away, there's no guarantee they'll ever come back. And if you've been reading Megan McArdle over the past year or so, you know that she has advanced the notion that top marginal rates are now sufficiently low that major Laffer Curve effects are not to be expected from further reductions. (Not sure I'm buying that argument, but it is worth considering.) So the question is not necessarily whether the Right is correct in saying that tax cuts will fix the economy or the Left is correct in saying that deficit spending will fix the economy. Rather, the question is, Can the economy be "fixed" at all?

That is to say, given all the economic realities -- including the graying of the workforce and the ballooning entitlement burden -- is there any government intervention that will automatically return us to the Good Times? I'm not entirely sure. There are textile-mill towns down home where the Good Times left and never came back. There are little towns all over rural America that have been shrinking toward ghost-town status for the past 15 or 20 years. Inner-city Detroit has never really recovered from the 1967 riots.

That a nation as large and wealthy as the United States might go down, never to rise again, is a remote possibility, but there is no guarantee we'll ever get back to the go-go heyday of 1987, when the Baby Boomers were age 23-41 and thus in their healthy prime working years. We have suffered a serious financial loss and, because of underlying structural problems in our economy, recovery will be difficult whatever the government does. But if government does the wrong thing, it's going to be much more difficult.

All this is to explain why we should be extremely pessimistic about the prospect of this massive neo-Keynesian intervention. Suppose a pipe-dream hypothetical: Somehow, this "stimulus" actually produces a sort of dead-cat bounce in the economy, so that unemployment is down around 5% again by 2012. Is that good? No, not really, because government will have produced that bounce by borrowing massively against the future in a society that's about to sustain a serious demographic shock.

The first Baby Boomers turn 65 in 2011, and every year after that will see more and more retirees going onto the Social Security and Medicare rolls. Even if we raise the retirement age, there is still the net drain of productive labor. The average 67-year-old can't produce goods and services as efficiently as the average 38-year-old and (due to certain legal decisions circa 1973) after 2011, we'll have a growing shortage of 38-year-olds and a growing surplus of 67-year-olds.

We are on the verge of a taxpayer shortage, you see, and what the Democrats want to do is take out a massive loan that will have to be repaid by a shrinking pool of taxpayers, who will be expected to support a burgeoning population of increasingly sickly Baby Boomer retirees.

So, even if all this deficit spending could purchase a dead-cat bounce -- and I am on record as saying it won't -- it cannot fix the underlying problems of our economy, which have nothing to do with "green energy" or other such nonsense programs run by the Department of Unicorns and Rainbows.

What we need, really, is a strong dose of Schumpeterian "creative destruction," and this neo-Keynesian approach is the exact opposite of that. No matter what government does, we may be doomed. But Obamanomics is like seeing a drowning man and tossing him a cinderblock instead of a life preserver.

Total bummer? Depends on your point of view. Back in 2003-06, when the economy was going gangbusters, you leftist bastards were all whining about "the growing gap between rich and poor." Well, congratulations: It's stopped growing, hasn't it?

If Obamanomics makes things worse (hello, "stagflation"!) then the advocates of social justice can do a happy dance because we'll all be more equal, and much, much poorer.

(Linked by Jules Crittenden, who gets the Instalanche for his Iran-blogging.)

(Linked by the Anchoress, who gives me waaaay too much credit for what was really just second-hand copyright infringement.)

(Ed Driscoll gives the linky-love, too.)

(Linked at Conservative Grapevine.)

(Linked at Maggie's Farm. BTW, I've updated this theme, with cute video.)

PREVIOUSLY: Malkin watches the Doomsayer-in-Chief's press conference so we don't have to:

"It is only government that can break the vicious cycle."

Government is the vicious cycle, sir.

UPDATE 9:21 p.m.: Back to his bogus "experts agree" argument:

Sir, experts agree your ears are too big.

UPDATE 8:55 p.m.: From his opening remarks:

I took a trip to Elkhart, Indiana today. Elkhart is a place that has lost jobs faster than anywhere else in America. In one year, the unemployment rate went from 4.7% to 15.3%. Companies that have sustained this community for years are shedding jobs at an alarming speed, and the people who’ve lost them have no idea what to do or who to turn to. They can’t pay their bills and they’ve stopped spending money. And because they’ve stopped spending money, more businesses have been forced to lay off more workers. Local TV stations have started running public service announcements that tell people where to find food banks, even as the food banks don’t have enough to meet the demand.

Folks, ask yourself why Elkhart's economy is hurting so bad. Because their No. 1 industry there is -- wait for it -- RVs. Yup, big-ass fuel-guzzling RVs that get worse gas mileage than an M1 tank. If it were up to Al Gore, driving one of those things would be punishable by the death penalty, and when gas went up to $4 a gallon, the market wasn't exactly craving those behemoths. But by the time gas prices fell back to $1.69 a gallon, the real-estate market had tanked, and nobody had the the money to buy a $70,000 motor home.

Supply. Demand. Very simple. Nothing against the good people of Elkhart, but (a) Obama's plan ain't going to do jack for your local economy, and (b) if you end up on the wrong side of the supply/demand equation, that's not the fault of the American taxpayer, is it? Cry me a river. I spent 22 years in the newspaper business, and nobody's offering to bail me out.

UPDATE: Althouse liveblogged. Loved this part:

7:14: "That wasn't just some random number that I plucked out of.... uh" -- he's thinking: can't say my ass — "out of a hat."

Allahpundit and AOSHQ are also blogging the press conference.

Michelle Malkin was liveblogging the action on the Senate floor today:

[Sen. Susan] Collins laundry-lists all the spending and concludes again: "Our effort is bipartisan, targeted, and effective."
No: It's pork-laden, out-of-control, and irresponsible.

Susan Collins (R-INO) would swallow a porcupine if you told her it was a "bipartisan compromise." Obama is scheduled to give a nationally televised press conference tonight at 8 p.m. ET, at which time he will tell us that we are doomed -- DOOMED! -- if this thing isn't passed immediately.

'Waxing sanguine'

Some congressional Republicans are "waxing sanguine" over their stimulus battle with Obama, says Lynn Vincent. She cites today's report by Byron York quoting Lindsay Graham:

"Instead of hanging our heads, we're picking good fights. In that regard, there is an energy among Republicans that is counterintuitive to the beating we just took."

Yeah, and considering that Senator Grahamnesty was a major cause of the beating, I sure hope he's happy.

Brokebarack Obama

From Aaron S. in the Graphics Department. In case you can't read the slogan: "His forbidden love of socialism was a force of nature."

Jack Hunter's girlfriend is right!

"Watching a television news story about Obama's stimulus package, my girlfriend, who not only voted for Obama but has the bumper sticker to prove it, said to me, 'I'm not an economist, but doesn't spending money you don't have make the situation worse? Doesn't it just devalue the dollar even more?' I'm not an economist either, but I did manage to pass basic math in high school. And unless the rules of math have changed recently, my girlfriend is absolutely right."
-- Jack Hunter, Charleston City Paper

Random freaking adults!

Matthew Yglesias does a happy dance over a Gallup poll showing higher public approval for Democrats than Republicans on handling the "stimulus."

Yglesias is exactly right that what the poll shows is, "People hate Republicans." That is to say, Bush-inflicted "brand damage" causes people to give negative answers to any poll question involving the word "Republican." There are two big problems with this poll as a guide to what policy Republicans (or anyone else) should support:

Rational ignorance -- One of the most interesting polls of the past year was the one showing that 41% of CNN viewers didn't even realize Democrats had taken control of Congress. What voters knew was that Bush was a Republican and they hated him, and therefore an overwhelming majority was eager to vote against Republicans. These voters -- independent "swing" voters being a particularly ill-informed segment of the electorate -- were operating on the principle that Ilya Somin dubbed "rational ignorance." Given the vastness of their ignorance, it is likely that many of them (a) still don't realize that Democrats hold the whip hand in Congress, and (b) don't have a clue in hell what's in the stimulus or what the GOP position is.
"Random adults" -- Gallup says, "Results are based on telephone interviews with 1,018 national adults, aged 18 and older." Not likely voters, not even registered voters, merely random adults. As everyone who knows anything about polling knows, non-voters always skew left of the actual electorate, especially on economic issues. Why? Because non-voters tend to have very low levels of income and education. The whole point of the massive Democratic get-out-the-vote drives every election year is to counteract the extremely low level of political involvement by the poor and ignorant, who would vote Democrat, if only they weren't too stupid and lazy to vote. (Obama got 63% of the vote among high-school dropouts, his best performance among any educational demographic. ) So polls that don't screen out non-voters will always show that feeble-minded welfare parasites want more welfare giveaways, and the parasites are at least smart enough to know that Democrats are the Welfare Giveaway Party.

Let Yglesias do his happy dance, and ignore those stupid "random adult" polls. Nothing Republicans do will gain them many votes among the parasite/deadbeat constituency, and certainly the GOP has nothing to gain by supporting a "stimulus" that won't work.

Stimulating unemployment

"Clearly, the chart shows that more government spending does not create jobs. In fact, it is exactly the opposite. More government spending is correlated with higher levels of unemployment. In 1965, federal government spending was 17.2% of GDP and the unemployment rate was 4%. By 1982, spending had increased to 23.1% of GDP and unemployment had climbed to almost 11%.
"Government spending then fell from its early-1980s peak back to a new low of 18.4% of GDP in 2000, and the unemployment rate fell back to a low of 3.8% in 2000. Lately, due mostly to the profligate spending of the Bush Administration, government spending has increased to 20.7% of GDP. And guess what, the unemployment rate is up, not down."
-- economist Brian Westbury

E-mail from Obama

From my inbox to the blog, without comment:

Robert --
Americans have organized Economic Recovery House Meetings in all 50 states -- including 382 in California, 255 in Florida, 115 in Ohio, 199 in New York, 105 in Washington, and 149 in Texas.That's more than 3,587 meetings in 1,579 cities and 429 congressional districts.
This past weekend, meeting hosts and guests watched a video of Governor Tim Kaine answering your questions about the president's recovery plan. Then they shared their own stories about how the crisis has affected them.
Watch Governor Kaine's video and share your economic crisis story.
The media is filled with numbers about the economic crisis. But the numbers do not tell the full story.
The story of this crisis is in homes across the country -- homes where a family member has lost a job, where parents are struggling to pay a mortgage, and where college tuition has slipped out of reach.
That's also where the story of our recovery begins -- in communities where repairing roads and bridges, manufacturing green technologies, and rehabilitating our schools and hospitals will directly impact the lives of ordinary people and their families.
President Obama's recovery plan will help struggling families right now by saving or creating up to 4 million jobs. But it will also help strengthen our economy for the future by investing in crucial infrastructure projects in health care, education, and energy.
Share your story about how this economic crisis is affecting you and your family and join your fellow Americans in supporting bold action to speed our recovery:
http://my.barackobama.com/sharestories
Thank you for organizing so much support at this crucial moment for our country,
Mitch
Mitch Stewart
Director
Organizing for America

Without comment, except three words. It Won't Work.

202-224-4254

That's the phone number for Sen. Arlen Specter's Capitol office, and I'm sure he'd love to hear your reaction to his support of the Pelosi-Reid "stimulus" plan.

If you can't get through -- lots of people want to share the love with Specter nowadays -- you can also try these numbers:

610-434-1444 (Allentown office)
814-453-3010 (Erie office)
717-782-3951 (Harrisburg office)
215-597-7200 (Philadelphia office)
412-644-3400 (Pittsburgh office)
570-346-2006 (Scranton office)
570-826-6265 (Wilkes-Barre office)

Three words: It Won't Work.

UPDATE: Sen. Jeff Sessions is pushing to get an amendment that would prohibit "stimulus" money from going to illegal aliens. How come Specter isn't supporting that? And who could possibly be against it?

Start your own d--- blog!

While over at Right Wing News, where I frequently cross-post, I noticed "RWN's Short & Sweet Guide to Creating Your Own Blog," which offers some very useful advice to wannabes and newbies. Since I make a little scratch now and then as a "New Media consultant," I'm not going to give away for free all my proprietary knowledge, but here are two key pieces of advice:

1. Link me often. This will prevent bad kharma. As a friend, I'm useless, but you wouldn't want me as an enemy.
2. Christina Hendricks.

People pay good money for that kind of advice.

Joe Feehery vs. Rush Limbaugh

An unequal match, prompting Mike at Cold Fury to retort:

Gee, I dunno, Mr Moderate. How have you spineless, big-spending, Dem-fellating RINO bums done the last two elections yourselves?

Heh. As if on cue, here's Arlen "Bukkake Queen" Specter to explain why he loves the taste of "stimulus"!

MUGGER ATTACKS BLOOMBERG

Russ "Mugger" Smith takes down the NYC mayor's "tone-deaf politics":

It takes a lot in 2009 to drop your jaw upon looking at the front page of a newspaper -- one now fairly shrugs at the laundry list of crippling economic news -- but last Friday, a particular New York Times story leapt out as if it were headlined in neon: "Bloomberg Campaigners Taste the High Life." . . .
[Y]ou have to marvel at Bloomberg's outlandish and arrogant demonstration of tone-deaf politics, considering that as he grapples with a $4 billion deficit by laying off cops and education employees, raising the city sales tax, trimming health care packages for NYC workers and imposing regressive taxes on items like bottles of soda, lottery tickets and cab rides, he's running for a third term as if the country and his city were in the midst of unparalleled prosperity. When asked by a Times reporter whether his projected $80 million reelection campaign was excessive, Bloomberg grew testy, responding, "I don't understand your question. I am not going to talk about the campaign… I think it's one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard."

Read the whole brutal thing.

Video: Newt Gingrich interview

At Friday's premiere of Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous With Destiny, I caught up with the former House Speaker and asked him about the future of the GOP, Sarah Palin, and the current "stimulus" proposal in a brief interview captured by Kerry Picket:

ON THE REPUBLICAN FUTURE:

"It depends on whether the Republican Party learns to focus on America first, and learn to rejoin the majority of American people that Ronald Reagan personified -- gives up big government and elite values -- and if they do that, they've got a great future. . . . I don't think about the party's future. I think about the future of the United States. I think Republicans ought to quit worrying about the Republican Party, and spend their time worrying about America."

ON THE 'STIMULUS':

"This is a spending bill, as President Obama said -- it's not a stimulus bill. It is an absurdity to have spent [$1.2 trillion] last year on this kind of spending, and come back for $900 billion this year. For the price of this bill, every American could have a seven-month holiday with no income tax, no Social Security tax, no Medicare tax and, for the employer, no matching tax. That would do dramatically more for the economy than this kind of policy . . ."

Notice that Gingrich (a) walked a wide circle around the brushfire war between the GOP intellectuals and Palin, and (b) sought to speak as a non-partisan figure concerned more with America's future than the GOP's future. A very shrewd man.

Mother Teresa with an AK-47?

"All my life, from birth, it's been a fight. And it always seemed to be another man's war. I always seemed to be fighting for someone else. But it always came back to me. The Word says we're born into sin, and sin always comes back to war."
-- Sam Childers

Lots of do-gooders want to help poor people in Africa. You can turn on the TV and see celebrities talk all about Africa at their charity concerts. And you can turn on the TV and see politicians yammer on about Africa. But while the rock stars and senators were talking, one courageous missionary was already there, fighting to save lives. When God's people in war-torn northern Uganda and southern Sudan needed help, God sent a Pennsylvania steel-worker's son, a two-fisted biker who wasn't afraid of a fight.

Another Man's War: The True Story of One Man's Battle to Save Children in the Sudan will be released next month, but you can pre-order it now at a special price.

The New York Times has a report on the effort to hunt down Joseph Kony and his LRA terrorists, who have inflicted evil in Africa for two decades. Last week, two of Kony's lieutenants said they're ready to surrender.

It (Still) Won't Work

(BUMPED; UPDATES BELOW.) From my latest American Spectator column:

. . . The real problem with the stimulus bill is not that it is too big (although it is too big) nor its various objectionable ingredients (although many are objectionable), but rather that it is based on a false economic theory.
"The American people…did not vote for the false theories of the past," Obama assured his listeners Thursday. Yet the "economic recovery plan" pushed by Pelosi and other Democrats is nothing but Keynesian theory in postmodern drag, elegantly costumed by the Orator-in-Chief with a lot of glittering generalities about "modernizing our health care system…21st century classrooms…and end[ing] the tyranny of oil in our time."
This plan is not a Change We Can Believe In and, as I wrote two months ago, before Obama was inaugurated, it won't work. . . .

Please read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds: "They won't tell you what they're doing with the money you already gave them until they make sure Congress is giving them still more." As a freelance writer, I've got the envy the rate paid by the U.S. taxapyer: $1 billion per page. (Via Memeorandum.)

Nowadays, everybody's saying "it won't work," and here's a video of Peter Schiff saying it:

UPDATE II: Ron Paul says it's "unfortunate that three Republicans caved in" to support the stimulus in the Senate.

UPDATE III: In honor of Sens. Specter, Snowe and Collins, Michelle Malkin dubs it the "Sellout Amendment."

UPDATE IV: Via Hot Air, here's new RNC chairman Michael Steele on the stimulus:

UPDATE V: One economist calls the bill "a seismic shift in the role of government in our society." Via Donald Douglas, who has more reflections on the big-government aspect of the Mother Of All Boondoggles.

UPDATE VI: Stephen Gordon links at The Next Right.

UPDATE VII: Jennifer Rubin: "Yeah, but the Senate moderates are cheap dates, so they fell for it."

UPDATE VIII: Linked by Vocal Minority.

Internet civility, an oxymoron?

John Hawkins does have a point:

That sort of compartmentalization is one of the reasons politics has become so ferociously partisan. On the Internet, people have broken up into small, like-minded groups where they have minimal contact with people who disagree with them. As a result, there is little pressure to show respect for the opinions of people who see the world differently -- since those people are, for the most part, not present. It means that facts that run contrary to their ideology will tend to be viewed with suspicion at best and will be totally ignored at worst, thereby creating groupthink on a titanic scale.

Yes, but also no. The Internet is a medium and, as Marshall McLuhan taught us, the medium is the message. Television has been a far more powerful contributor to the decline of civility and the loss of the sense of civic duty. The rise of the 100-plus-channel cable environment has made it easier to "drop out" of mainstream society, to spend all your leisure hours watching sports or whatever specialty programming suits your taste. And considering what is now "mainstream" -- the worthless dreck of network programming -- this is an understandable instinct.

TV destroys civility because TV watching absorbs time that educated people once filled with reading. Furthermore, by its very nature as a primarily visual medium, TV celebrates the superficial. This is as true of TV news as of any episode of "Oprah" or "American Idol." Give credit to Fox News impressario Roger Ailes for the brilliant insight of finding glamorous anchorettes like Laurie Dhue. If we're going to tune in for an hour of war, murder, celebrity gossip and political intrigue, why not let a hottie be our hostess?

One of McLuhan's students, Neil Postman, wrote a great book about the culture-killing phenomenon of TV, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, and it's a book I wish everyone would read. Postman was a man of the Left, politically, but he cared deeply about how the image-based medium of television, when consumed in large quantities, rendered people incapable of engaging effectively with the text-based medium of writing. Another great book addressing the same basic issue is The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, by Sven Birkerts.

All this is far afield from the question of how the Internet -- and especially the blogosphere -- contributes to the loss of civility. But the blogosphere is still, for the most part, a text-based environment. Literacy and civility generally coexist, and I think the savagery that sometimes erupts among bloggers is due in large part to the influence of TV on the discourse.

When does TV ever explain, in a dispassionate way, the fundamental facts of economics? If you understand how markets work, and if you understand the inherent limitations of the alternatives to a market-based economy, then the entire class-envy rationale of the Democratic Party's economic agenda becomes absurd.

I refuse to apologize for "incivility" toward dangerous ignorance, which is why I was so curt in dismissing Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons. How does a man, describing himself as a "conservative," reach a mature age without apparently ever having read Mises or Hayek? The Road to Serfdom is less than 300 pages, and I don't think it took me more than a weekend to finish the first time through. Socialism is a bit over 500 pages, and might take longer.

Yet in 10 days, I believe, you could read through both books, and any intelligent, decent person would finish that experience wholly persuaded of the case these great Austrian economists make: Socialism doesn't work, it is ultimately destructive of both liberty and prosperity, and even a liberal democratic government attempting to implement socialist ideas will tend toward increasingly undemocratic and illiberal governance.

If I am contemptuous of the intellectual laziness of "conservatives" who can't be bothered to read economics -- hello, Governor Huckabee! -- why should I be less contemptuous of liberals who are equally ignorant if not more so? And what about Paul Krugman, who can't even plead ignorance, but whose advocacy of welfare state socialism must be attributed to evil?

We are right, and they are wrong. We do not merely "disagree with them." We advocate liberty, and they are enemies of liberty. The socialists aim to destroy all opposition, to deprive us of our liberty, and to immerse our nation in hopeless poverty. Some support socialism due to their ignorance, while others are simply evil. We can hope to educate the ignorant, but what shall we do with the evil?

Am I engaged in "groupthink on a titanic scale"? Were Mises and Hayek likewise engaged? When it comes to the basic truths of economics, "the opinions of people who see the world differently" -- i.e., people whose opinions are rooted in ignorance, falsehood and error -- ought not be respected, and indeed ought to be disrespected loudly and often. If we would resolve to be less tolerant of these economic ignoramuses, perhaps we might shame them into actually learning something.

The evil, of course, are another matter.

UPDATE: Fear & Loathing in Georgetown comments:

The conservatives he refers to are Dreher's Crunchy Cons and, as mentioned in the quotation above, the evangelical types. I agree wholeheartedly that they should read their economics, but that might miss something more fundamental. The Crunchy Cons and the evangelicals to an even larger extent pursue politics for their own therapeutic purposes. They want the government to ban, discourage, encourage, promote behaviors because that's what makes them feel better about themselves. The economics aren't particularly relevant to accomplishing that.

I am myself an evangelical, but like James Madison (who was educated at Princetown under the Presbyterian tutelage of Witherspoon) my views on faith are heavily Calvinistic. That translates, politically, into a distrust of power and a skeptical view toward "progress." Men are not more virtuous today than they were 50 years ago, nor will men 50 years from now be any better. Original sin is a constant, and which is more likely over the next 50 years, enlightenment or decadence?

"Progress"? We've made progress down the road to hell. We appear to be gaining momentum as we go, and the young do not even notice the acceleration.

However, the failure to learn economics is not exclusively a problem of "crunchies" or evangelicals. Crazy Cousin John confessed his own economic ignorance, and many who rallied to the colors after 9/11 -- the patriotic hawkish types -- share that ignorance.

I consider economics of the Austrian school completely compatible with Christian faith. What did the Good Samaritan do to deserve Christ's praise? He gave personal and direct assistance to the waylaid traveler, from his own resources. He did not circulate a petition or stage a protest march or enact legislation on behalf of waylaid travelers in general; the Good Samaritan's mercy was self-sufficient and independent.

Much of this noise you hear about "social justice" from evangelicals nowadays is nothing more than Pharisaical do-gooderism. If you want to help the poor, help the poor; nothing prevents you from doing so. But if you're waiting for me to praise you for collecting a six-figure salary as head of a 501(c) operation -- as if being the president of a non-profit makes you Mother Teresa -- you will be waiting a very long time.

UPDATE II: Linked at The Week. Thanks, you %@#&ing @$$holes.

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Too bad . . .

"What's in the Senate stimulus plan? All we have so far is a summary and a spreadsheet. The specifics of what the money is going to be spent on remains carefully concealed from view. Too bad we didn't elect an administration which promised to publish the full text of bills in advance of votes. Oh, right."
-- Jennifer Rubin

Don't worry, Jennifer. Just give 'em $800 billion, and you'll get all the transparency money can buy! Jimmy Bise Jr. at Sundries Shack has very similar thoughts, vis-a-vis the TARP:

Think about that. Your government refuses to tell you what it’s going to do with money it took from you under what we now see were false pretenses unless you let it take even more money under the very same pretenses.

"Trust us -- we're experts," is one of those rotten scams that no self-respecting carnie would dare attempt.

Obama 'coddling conservatives'?

Maureen Dowd on psilocybin:

Somehow the most well-known person on the planet lost control of the economic message to someone named Eric Cantor. . . .
Barack Obama could not locate the bully pulpit and ended up being bullied.
Republicans, pulled out of their existential lethargy and re-energized by the president's charm offensive, immediately mounted an offensive against him. Just as Michael Bloomberg learned the perils of cuddling a groundhog when it bit him, Mr. Obama learned the perils of coddling conservatives.

This is simply counterfactual. Dowd is hallucinating, a different derangement than Judith Warner's neurotic obsessive disorder, but nonetheless utterly out of touch with the reality of what happened.

Obama did not "coddle" anyone. He wanted Republican votes for the Democratic "stimulus" bill so as to head off partisan attacks on his economic policy, a policy which -- I'll say it again -- won't work. If he could pull over a double handful of GOP votes, he'd have the tissue wrapping of "bipartisanship" that would inoculate him against blame if the policy ended in disaster. (You saw how much trouble Democrats had in attacking the Iraq war that Bush got so many of them to vote for.)

"Someone named Eric Cantor" may not be as famous as Barack Obama, but Cantor worked for 10 years in the real economy -- his family's real-estate business -- and so he knows a thing or two about economics. Cantor knows that, if enacted, the Pelosi plan will make the economy worse, not better. And he was apparently able to persuade his GOP House colleagues that the "stimulus" was wrong, both as policy and as politics.

Since Dowd's tripping on magic mushrooms here, let's all engage in a little hallucinogenic reverie, shall we? Pretend that the Pelosi plan actually creates an economic recovery. Will Republicans get any credit for "yes" votes? Is voting "yes" going to help Susan Collins or Olympia Snowe win re-election? Of course not. This is a Democratic bill, embodying Democratic priorities, and all the credit will be claimed by Democrats.

So, even under the psychedelic delusion that the Pelosi neo-Keynesian approach could actually work, there is zero incentive for Republicans to vote "yes." Nancy and Harry Reid have the majority, let them pass it. It's theirs; they own it, lock, stock and barrel. And in this drug-addled vision where Keynesianism works, the economy recovers -- at the expense of $780 billion in taxpayer dollars that must be repaid somehow.

Ah, see? Win-win, baby. Republicans represent taxpayers, who will be presented the bill for all this, and won't like paying the bill, even if the stimulus does lead to recovery. But it won't. And so Pelosi and Reid and Obama will be on the hook for a $780 billion failure, with the overwhelming likelihood that the economy will in fact be much worse in fall 2010 than it is now, and except for the Senate GOP Jellyfish Caucus, there won't be a single Republican fingerprint on this disaster.

That's the reality, and if Maureen Dowd is too stoned to see it, she needs to be reassigned to do more fluffy travel features.

'Rendezvous' premiere

Friday's premiere of the new documentary, Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous With Destiny, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, was a standing-room only affair.

Produced by Citizens United in association with Newt and Calista Gingrich, directed by Kevin Knoblock, Rendezvous With Destiny features interviews with Jack Kemp, James A. Baker III, William J. Bennett, Linda Chavez, Edwin Meese III, Mari Maseng Will, Richard Perle, Michael Reagan, Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, Natan Sharansky, Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, historian Douglas Brinkley, newsman Sam Donaldson and many more.

All of these people appear in the movie, but the star of the show is indisputably Ronald Reagan. The film footage and photos of Reagan in the movie are the highlights. His star quality carries the film. Here's the trailer, and below that, some photos from the premiere.

David Bossie, president of Citizens United, at left; American Spectator publisher Al Regnery, at right.

Newt Gingrich talks with Seattle talk-radio king Kirby Wilbur, a member of the board of the Young America's Foundation, which gave filmmakers access to the Reagan Ranch near Santa Barbara, Calif.