George Will,

Kudos for taking the New York Times to task today. I have just one comment for your thought.
Assuming it takes 30yrs or so for the "enlightened ones" to realize that global warming is what global cooling was-a shibboleth, I'm not sure the NY Times will be around to become even more enlightened.

Though the newspaper industry is suffering, the NY Times is notable given it just took out a huge "home equity" loan on its office building and are now paying -in an era of record low rates, Carlos Slim 14% for his loan. It is burning through $20mln cash per quarter and given its size of its balance sheet, a concern of company viability could emerge within two very short years.

Jack Bauer wasn't born, he was unleashed.
Chuck Norris is tough, but Jack Bauer is tougher. Walker Texas Ranger never had to deal with Terrorist and get things done in 24 hours or did he? Anyway, Jack Bauer is tough, and he is the new man with the Random Facts.
1.If you wake up in the morning, it is because Jack Bauer spared your life.
2.Upon hearing that he was played by Kiefer Sutherland, Jack Bauer killed Sutherland. Jack Bauer gets played by no man.
3.If Jack Bauer was in a room with Hitler, Stalin, and Nina Meyers, and he had a gun with 2 bullets, he'd shoot Nina twice.
4.Jack Bauer killed 93 people in just 4 days time. Wait, that is a real fact.
5.Jack Bauer got Hellen Keller to talk.
6.Jack Bauer was never addicted to heroin. Heroin was addicted to Jack Bauer.
7.Jack Bauer’s favorite color is severe terror alert red. His second favorite color is violet, but just because it sounds like violent.
8. 1.6 billion Chinese are angry with Jack Bauer. Sounds like a fair fight.
9.If Jack says I just want to talk to him/her and that him/her is you¦ well amigo, you are fucked.
10.Jack Bauer once forgot where he put his keys. He then spent the next half-hour torturing himself until he gave up the location of the keys.
11.Jack Bauer doesn’t miss. If he didn’t hit you it is because he was shooting at another terrorist twelve miles away.
12.If you get 7 stars on your wanted level on Grand Theft Auto, Jack Bauer comes after you. You don’t want to get 7 stars.
13.When you open a can of whoop-ass, Jack Bauer jumps out.
14.Jack Bauer does not sleep. The only rest he needs is what he gets when he’s knocked out or temporarily killed.
15.If you are still conscious, it is because Jack Bauer doesn’t want to carry you.
16.Jack Bauer has no problem following orders, unless you tell him to do something he doesn’t want to.
17.Jack Bauer’s gun is actually a water pistol, but the water shoots out in the form of bullets. Why? Because the gun is being held by Jack fucking Bauer.
18.Lets get one thing straight, the only reason you are conscious right now is because Jack Bauer does not feel like carrying you.
19.As a child, Jack Bauer’s first words were There’s no time!
20.While being put under in the hospital, Jack Bauer can count backwards from 100 every time. This annoys the doctors.
21.Jack Bauer can watch all 4 seasons of 24 in 24 hours.
22.Jack Bauer literally died for his country, and lived to tell about it.
23.Jack Bauer’s family threw him a surprise birthday party when he was a child. Once.
24.Killing Jack Bauer doesn’t make him dead. It just makes him angry.
25.Every time Jack Bauer yells NOW! at the end of a sentence, a terrorist dies.
26.If Jack’s starring at someone and his eye twitches, assume that person has less than 15 minutes to live.
27.When life gave Jack Bauer lemons, he used them to kill terrorists. Jack Bauer fucking hates lemonade.
28.Guns don’t kill people, Jack Bauer kills people.
29.David Spade always says yes to Jack Bauer when he wants to redeem his credit card miles.
30.Don’t ask what Jack Bauer would do for a Klondike bar

Bookshelf
Trying to Turn the Corner
General Motors now supports five retirees for every active employee.
General Motors Corp.'s reporting of alarming fourth- quarter results yesterday underlined one salient fact about the trouble in Motor City: Of the Big Three auto makers, GM is in by far the biggest trouble. Ford Motor Co. has cash and Chrysler LLC has an Italian suitor ready to absorb it as a North American arm of its business. But GM -- which suffered a net loss of $9.6 billion last quarter, $30.9 billion for the year -- needs $2 billion from taxpayers next month, in addition to the $13.4 billion it has already received, or it's off to bankruptcy court.
In 1953, when the GM chief executive at the time, Charlie Wilson, told Congress that what's good for America is good for General Motors, the fate that the company currently faces was unthinkable. Back then, GM employed more people than lived in Delaware and Nevada combined, and the company owned about 50% of the automotive market. When President Dwight Eisenhower needed a defense secretary, he chose Wilson. GM unquestionably mattered.
Despite what legions of skeptics might believe, William Holstein thinks that's still the case. His "Why GM Matters" is well-timed: Plenty of folks would be relieved to hear a convincing case that counters the drumbeat of dire reports about GM. The figures can be daunting. The company now supports five retirees in the U.S. for every active employee. The pool of people collecting pensions from GM nearly equals the population of Wyoming and will likely exceed half a million in 2009. Production of the company's trademark products -- trucks and SUVs -- fell 70% in January. And it's hard to find evidence to counter the grim news.
Still, Mr. Holstein has taken on the task. A business journalist who has periodically written about the U.S. auto industry in recent years, he spent nine months in 2008 visiting the corporate headquarters and traveling to GM outposts in Europe and Asia. He interviewed a broad range of employees -- factory workers, engineers and top brass, including Chief Executive Rick Wagoner. While Mr. Holstein labored, GM ran out of cash.
As sometimes happens when a reporter is granted unusual access within a company, Mr. Holstein seems to have become a captive of GM's corporate thinking. On the basis of his reporting, the author says, he believes "that GM, with the benefit of federal loan guarantees, will reach a point at which it is very competitive." He adds: "Federal assistance will not be wasted."
Like Mr. Wagoner, Mr. Holstein argues that GM is still too big too fail -- he doesn't dwell on the possible benefits is company declares bankruptcy, sorts out its costs and returns to the marketplace. The carnage would simply be catastrophic, he says, if a company with 6,200 dealers, 47 assembly plants and 1,500 suppliers in North America were allowed to go under. "On a national scale, there are other multipliers to consider," he says. "If GM spends a dollar to buy a particular part, that dollar is then used to buy a subpart or to pay workers at the parts supplier, who go into their communities to buy food or housing."
Mr. Holstein supports this simple thesis by taking readers to places that GM loves to talk about: the studios where the Chevrolet Volt is being developed; the office in Shanghai from which the auto maker is refining its assault on the Chinese market; the design shop for the forthcoming Chevrolet Camaro. He even burns a chapter discussing the virtues of Onstar, the money-losing, subscription-based navigation and communications system that was once heralded by Mr. Wagoner as central to GM's future.
Mr. Holstein tells readers about people like Burt Wong, a 35-year-old vehicle designer who is celebrated in the China chapter for helping adapt a Buick model to meet local demand for gaudy luxury. Mr. Wong was one of the key people behind a global design project that resulted in a new Buick LaCrosse, due to the market this year, that is meant to appeal to Chinese and American buyers alike.
But Buicks and Camaros and plug-in Chevy Volts are all unprofitable ventures for GM. The author might have been better able to gauge whether GM will continue to matter if he had stopped by the treasurer's office -- the wheelhouse on GM's sinking ship. Fritz Henderson is barely mentioned in the book, even though he is the chief operating officer who has spent the past three years scrambling to fix broken operations such as the parts maker Delphi Corp., GMAC financing and Saturn Corp. Chief Financial Officer Ray Young, who couldn't convince the credit markets to lend GM money last summer, doesn't even make an appearance in "Why GM Matters."
We do meet Harry Clay, though. He is a GM assembly-line worker who builds station wagons in Lansing, Mich. Mr. Clay provides some insight into the sort of thinking that prevails at the company. "I can't blame it on the managers," Mr. Clay says. "I think it's a set of circumstances lined up like the perfect storm -- the economy, weakened dollar, a global system. And I blame the lawmakers." (The gripe against Washington by auto makers is that cries for help on trade policy, research subsidies and health care have been ignored, while environmental zealots have had a disproportionate amount of influence over the creation of costly emissions regulations.)
Mr. Clay is 34 years old. Depending on his employment history, he could be eligible for one of GM's gold-plated, union-mandated retirements in less than 15 years. Between now and then, if the company continues its present practices, he will pay little for health care and have the assurance that a bountiful pension will greet him as he settles in for most of the second half of his life.
But this sort of insupportable financial burden for the company does not draw Mr. Holstein's criticism. Like Mr. Clay, the author blames GM's woes on lawmakers -- and short-sellers, private-equity firms, Wall Street analysts, ill-informed reporters and villains from past GM management teams. But not the current managers and certainly not the United Auto Workers union. Mr. Holstein surely means well with "Why GM Matters," but at a time when it is essential for taxpayers to gain a clear understanding of what's at stake in the automotive crisis, it doesn't help to look at the matter through a rose- colored windshield. That approach is what helped Detroit drive straight into its current predicament.

Climate Science in A Tornado


Few phenomena generate as much heat as disputes about current orthodoxies concerning global warming. This column recently reported and commented on some developments pertinent to the debate about whether global warming is occurring and what can and should be done. That column, which expressed skepticism about some emphatic proclamations by the alarmed, took a stroll down memory lane, through the debris of 1970s predictions about the near certainty of calamitous global cooling.

Concerning those predictions, the New York Times was -- as it is today in a contrary crusade -- a megaphone for the alarmed, as when (May 21, 1975) it reported that "a major cooling of the climate" was "widely considered inevitable" because it was "well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950." Now the Times, a trumpet that never sounds retreat in today's war against warming, has afforded this column an opportunity to revisit another facet of this subject -- meretricious journalism in the service of dubious certitudes.

On Wednesday, the Times carried a "news analysis" -- a story in the paper's news section, but one that was not just reporting news -- accusing Al Gore and this columnist of inaccuracies. Gore can speak for himself. So can this columnist.

Reporter Andrew Revkin's story was headlined: "In Debate on Climate Change, Exaggeration Is a Common Pitfall." Regarding exaggeration, the Times knows whereof it speaks, especially when it revisits, if it ever does, its reporting on the global cooling scare of the 1970s, and its reporting and editorializing -- sometimes a distinction without a difference -- concerning today's climate controversies.

Which returns us to Revkin. In a story ostensibly about journalism, he simply asserts -- how does he know this? -- that the last decade, which passed without warming, was just "a pause in warming." His attempt to contact this writer was an e-mail sent at 5:47 p.m., a few hours before the Times began printing his story, which was not so time-sensitive -- it concerned controversies already many days running -- that it had to appear the next day. But Revkin reported that "experts said" this columnist's intervention in the climate debate was "riddled with" inaccuracies. Revkin's supposed experts might exist and might have expertise but they do not have names that Revkin wished to divulge.

As for the anonymous scientists' unspecified claims about the column's supposedly myriad inaccuracies: The column contained many factual assertions but only one has been challenged. The challenge is mistaken.

Citing data from the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, as interpreted on Jan. 1 by Daily Tech, a technology and science news blog, the column said that since September "the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began." According to the center, global sea ice levels at the end of 2008 were "near or slightly lower than" those of 1979. The center generally does not make its statistics available, but in a Jan. 12 statement the center confirmed that global sea ice levels were within a difference of less than 3 percent of the 1980 level.

So the column accurately reported what the center had reported. But on Feb. 15, the Sunday the column appeared, the center, then receiving many e-mail inquiries, issued a statement saying "we do not know where George Will is getting his information." The answer was: From the center, via Daily Tech. Consult the center's Web site where, on Jan. 12, the center posted the confirmation of the data that this column subsequently reported accurately.

The scientists at the Illinois center offer their statistics with responsible caveats germane to margins of error in measurements and precise seasonal comparisons of year-on-year estimates of global sea ice. Nowadays, however, scientists often find themselves enveloped in furies triggered by any expression of skepticism about the global warming consensus (which will prevail until a diametrically different consensus comes along; see the 1970s) in the media-environmental complex. Concerning which:

On Feb. 18 the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that from early January until the middle of this month, a defective performance by satellite monitors that measure sea ice caused an underestimation of the extent of Arctic sea ice by 193,000 square miles, which is approximately the size of California. The Times ("All the news that's fit to print"), which as of this writing had not printed that story, should unleash Revkin and his unnamed experts.

“When we elected Obama, we didn't know what a gambler we were getting”

--David Broder in today’s Washington Post

Who Knew?
Who Knew?

How pathetic!

"You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot build character and courage by taking away people's initiative and independence. You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves."

-------Abraham Lincoln

Obama's description of the Bush-era tax cuts. "A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy," he explained in his Tuesday speech, after earlier saying, "tax cuts alone can't solve all of our economic problems -- especially tax cuts that are targeted to the wealthiest few."

The Bush tax cuts were not targeted to "the wealthiest few." Everyone who paid federal income taxes received a tax cut, with the largest percentage of reductions going to those at the bottom. Last year, a family of four making $40,000 saved an average of $2,053 because of the Bush tax cuts. The tax code became more progressive as the share paid by the top 10% increased to 46.4% from 46% -- and the nation experienced 52 straight months of job growth after the cuts took effect. And since when is giving back some of what people pay in taxes "transferring wealth?"

Consider the IRS data for 2006, the most recent year that such tax data are available and a good year for the economy and "the wealthiest 2%." Roughly 3.8 million filers had adjusted gross incomes above $200,000 in 2006. (That's about 7% of all returns; the data aren't broken down at the $250,000 point.) These people paid about $522 billion in income taxes, or roughly 62% of all federal individual income receipts. The richest 1% -- about 1.65 million filers making above $388,806 -- paid some $408 billion, or 39.9% of all income tax revenues, while earning about 22% of all reported U.S. income.

D.C. and the Constitution

Will Democrats let the law get in the way of an extra House seat?

The House of Representatives seems set to grow by two Members, to 437, after next year's election. Yesterday the District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act passed a key procedural vote in the Senate, making passage of the legislation, which President Obama supports, all but certain. The only thing standing in the way may be the Constitution.

The District of Columbia is reliably and overwhelmingly Democratic, and most of the bill's sponsors are Democrats. But one Republican is conspicuous among its sponsors: Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah. That is because the legislation also creates a new House seat for Mr. Hatch's state, which in 2000 lost out to North Carolina for the 435th seat because the Census Bureau declined to count Mormon missionaries temporarily overseas as Utah residents.

Utah is one of the most Republican states in the country, but this is still a bad trade for the GOP. Whereas the new District of Columbia seat is permanent, and Democratic dominance in D.C. is as permanent as such things can be, the other new seat will be Utah's for only two years. Thereafter, like all other Congressional seats, it will be reassigned every 10 years as part of reapportionment. It could just as easily go to a Democratic state as to a Republican one.

More important, the legislation runs afoul of the plain language of the Constitution, which provides that House members shall be chosen "by the People of the several States" and stipulates that the District of Columbia is not a state.

In 1960, Congress proposed a Constitutional amendment giving residents of the capital the right to vote for President. The 23rd Amendment was ratified the following year. The District already sends a nonvoting delegate to the House, but if Congress wishes to grant it full representation, it should do so by amending, not ignoring, the Constitution.

Obama finds the Bush center

So far as president, Obama is startlingly like his predecessor on a number of issues.

Jonah Goldberg
February 24, 2009

Here's something President Obama's biggest fans may need to hear: He's just not that into you.

Recall that during the primaries, Obama was probably second only to Dennis Kucinich as an anti-Iraq war and anti-Bush candidate. But he has kept President Bush's Defense secretary and appointed a secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who voted for the war. His vice president, Joe Biden, also voted for the war. Obama himself seems to be in less of a hurry to leave Iraq than we might have expected from listening to him over the last couple of years.

The new president has ordered that his predecessor's rendition policies remain largely intact, even to the point of using the "state secrets" privilege to block a rendition lawsuit. Obama may have stated categorically that America "will not torture," but outsourcing it is still OK.

The White House also defends the Bush policy of imprisoning, without trial, enemy combatants captured abroad. Obama's lawyers argued in a court case brought by Afghan prisoners at the U.S. Air Force base at Bagram, Afghanistan, that the "government adheres to its previously articulated position" -- the one articulated by those evil Bush lawyers.

Meanwhile, a new Pentagon study commissioned by Obama has found that the prison at Guantanamo Bay meets the standards of the Geneva Convention. One can only guess how the White House will make use of that finding. At the least, it should provide cover while the administration looks for alternatives to Gitmo that might not be all that alternative.

On the domestic front, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has decided that Bush's signature No Child Left Behind Act should be retained and moderately reformed. His boldest suggestion so far? "Let's rebrand it. Give it a new name." Now that's change even cynics can believe in.

In a rare instance of consistency between his campaign and his presidency, Obama is keeping Bush's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, though he's renamed that one.

There are many lessons one could draw from Obama's actions. You might conclude that the famous pragmatist recognizes that this is a center-right country after all. Or that he is a hypocrite, a statesman, or both, now that the buck stops with him.

You could say that this all shows that Bush's war-on-terrorism policies weren't nearly as outrageous as his opponents, Obama included, said they were. Some conservatives might argue that it demonstrates how centrist, even liberal, Bush's domestic policies were. Obama supporters might claim it proves that conservative fears that Obama was a crazy left-winger were always unfounded.

But how do Obama's biggest fans reconcile his contradictions? The slickest approach is to chalk up every about-face and inexplicable decision to Obama's abiding genius.

"Mr. Obama is like a championship chess player, always several moves ahead of friend and foe alike," explained New York Times columnist Bob Herbert. Translation: The One may move in mysterious ways, but that's no reason to doubt him.

Self-described conservatives who supported Obama in the election have made a similarly non-falsifiable argument about his qualifications (given that his record was patently unconservative): He simply has a superior presidential "temperament."

Such rationalizations reveal more continuity between Bush and Obama. Their biggest fans and foes seem driven by emotion rather than reason. We've seen this before. Bill Clinton moved his party to the right, but a lot of conservatives and liberals couldn't stomach acknowledging it. Bush was mostly a moderate Republican, but his liberal enemies hated him, and anything they hated had to be "right-wing." Even Republicans who admired Bush couldn't bring themselves to admit that the subject of their adoration might not in fact be a true-blue conservative.

Indeed, thanks in part to the lazy framing of the media and the pressure cooker of partisan Washington, conservatism became defined as Bushism, liberalism as not-Bushism, even though Bush had campaigned as a "different kind of Republican" and said over and over that "compassionate conservatism" was a sharp break with conventional conservatism.

It's early yet, but I think we're seeing with Obama what happened with Bush. The chess master is really just a man who's figuring it out as he goes along. Sometimes he'll be right; other times, horribly wrong. But whether he's right or wrong, left-wing or centrist, liberalism will likely mean whatever Barack Obama says it means.

Obama the market killer.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed 9,625 on Tuesday November 4, 2008 when we voted for our 44th president. The next day, after Obama had won it lost -5% (worst single day following a presidential election).
The Dow opened at 8281.22 on the morning of Obama's inauguration. Today it opens at 7,377 or almost a full quarter of market capitalization has been lost - again a record loss in stock market wealth following a presidential election.
That's a vote of practically no confidence in Obama's strategy for reviving the economy. The numbers were worse on the biggest days of the Obama presidency. The Dow fell 332.13 points on inauguration day, 381.99 points on the day Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner announced step two in the bank bailout, and 297.91 points when the president signed the stimulus bill three days ago. Financial markets are a bet on the future. The market's view is that an Obamanomics-driven economy looks grim.

Is the Administration Winging It?
Obama's reputation for competence is at risk.

By KARL ROVE

Team Obama demonstrated remarkable discipline during the presidential campaign. From raising an unprecedented amount of money to milking every advantage from the Internet to grabbing lots of delegates from inexpensive caucus states, they left nothing to chance.

And now the administration has scored a major legislative victory in an extraordinarily short period of time. Less than 700 hours after taking the oath of office, President Barack Obama signed the largest spending bill in American history.


Nevertheless, this fast start can't overcome a growing sense the administration is winging it on issues large and small.

Take the vetting of cabinet nominees. Mr. Obama's aides ignored a federal investigation of New Mexico's Gov. Bill Richardson that started last August for a possible pay-for-play scandal. Mr. Richardson had to withdraw after being named to become secretary of commerce.

The administration treated as inconsequential the failure of its choices for Treasury secretary and White House performance officer, as well as its labor secretary-designate's spouse, to pay taxes. It failed to uncover Tom Daschle's problems with more than $102,943 in previously unpaid taxes, penalties and interest -- and once it did, aides assumed Mr. Daschle would be given a pass.

Team Obama promised Gen. Anthony Zinni he'd be ambassador to Iraq, then cut him loose without explanation. After the Bill Richardson fiasco, it romanced Republican Sen. Judd Gregg for commerce secretary -- then ignored his advice on the stimulus and wouldn't trust him with running the department, moving supervision of the Census into the White House. Mr. Gregg withdrew himself from consideration.

Then there is the stimulus itself. Mr. Obama's economic team met with congressional leaders in December to green light a bill costing up to $850 billion. But they described less than $200 billion of what they wanted in the envelope. In return for outsourcing the bill's drafting to Congress, the administration took on two responsibilities: running polls to advise Hill Democrats on how to sharpen their marketing, and putting the president on the road to sell a bill others wrote.


Team Obama was winging it when it declared the stimulus would "save or create" 2.5 million, then three million, then 3.7 million, and then four million new jobs. These were arbitrary and erratic numbers, and they knew there's no way to count "saved" jobs. Americans, being commonsensical, will focus on Mr. Obama's promise to "create" jobs. It's highly unlikely that more than 180,000 jobs will be created each month by the end of next year. The precise, state-by-state job numbers the administration used to sell the stimulus are likely to come back to haunt them as well.

Bipartisanship? The administration failed even to respond to GOP offers to endorse an Obama campaign proposal to suspend capital gains taxes for new small businesses.

Inexplicably, the president, in a prime-time press conference, raised expectations for Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's bank rescue plan, which turned out the next day to be no plan at all. The markets craved details; they got none. When markets cratered, spokesmen didn't acknowledge the administration's poor planning, but blamed the markets.

Team Obama was also winging it on enhanced interrogation of terrorists. First it nullified all the Bush administration's legal authorities before considering what rules it should have in place. When the CIA briefed White House officials on the results obtained from these techniques, the administration backtracked and organized a four-month study of what rules were appropriate.

Something similar happened with the promise to close Guantanamo Bay within a year: The administration has no idea what it will do with the violent terrorists detained there. And on ethics, Mr. Obama proclaimed an end to lobbyist influence in government -- even as he was nominating lobbyists for major posts and filling White House ranks with former lobbyists.

Team Obama has been living off its campaign reputation for planning and execution. That reputation is now frayed, and all the bumbling and unforced errors will have an impact. Such things don't go unnoticed on Capitol Hill or in foreign capitals.

The president, a bright and skilled politician, has plenty of time to recover. The danger is that what we have seen is not an aberration, but the early indications of his governing style. Barack Obama won the job he craved, now he must demonstrate that he and his team are up to its requirements. The signs are worrisome. The world is a dangerous place. The days of winging it need to end.

The Fierce Urgency of Pork


By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, February 6, 2009; Page A17

"A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe."

-- President Obama, Feb. 4, 2009

Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear." Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.

And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence peddlers from the temple. An ostentatious executive order banning lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a dozen current or former lobbyists to high position. Followed by a Treasury secretary who allegedly couldn't understand the payroll tax provisions in his 1040. Followed by Tom Daschle, who had to fall on his sword according to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can have more than one tax delinquent.

The Daschle affair was more serious because his offense involved more than taxes. As Michael Kinsley once observed, in Washington the real scandal isn't what's illegal, but what's legal. Not paying taxes is one thing. But what made this case intolerable was the perfectly legal dealings that amassed Daschle $5.2 million in just two years.

He'd been getting $1 million per year from a law firm. But he's not a lawyer, nor a registered lobbyist. You don't get paid this kind of money to instruct partners on the Senate markup process. You get it for picking up the phone and peddling influence.

At least Tim Geithner, the tax-challenged Treasury secretary, had been working for years as a humble international civil servant earning non-stratospheric wages. Daschle, who had made another cool million a year (plus chauffeur and Caddy) for unspecified services to a pal's private equity firm, represented everything Obama said he'd come to Washington to upend.

And yet more damaging to Obama's image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama's name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.

It's not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It's not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.

It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.

Not just to abolish but to create something new -- a new politics where the moneyed pork-barreling and corrupt logrolling of the past would give way to a bottom-up, grass-roots participatory democracy. That is what made Obama so dazzling and new. Turns out the "fierce urgency of now" includes $150 million for livestock (and honeybee and farm-raised fish) insurance.


The Age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington. By the time the stimulus bill reached the Senate, reports the Wall Street Journal, pharmaceutical and high-tech companies were lobbying furiously for a new plan to repatriate overseas profits that would yield major tax savings. California wine growers and Florida citrus producers were fighting to change a single phrase in one provision. Substituting "planted" for "ready to market" would mean a windfall garnered from a new "bonus depreciation" incentive.

After Obama's miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie. The hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The great ethical transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all presidents tell -- and that this president told better than anyone.

I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half weeks.

Dodd's Peek-A-Boo Disclosure
The Senator's modified, limited mortgage hangout.

Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd has finally, sort of, kind of, ended 193 days of stonewalling about his sweetheart loans from former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo. At least he did if you were a fast reader and were one of the few reporters he invited to his Hartford office yesterday to review -- but not copy or take -- more than 100 pages of documents related to his 2003 mortgage financings through Countrywide's "Friends of Angelo" program.


These are the files that Mr. Dodd pledged to make public after the news broke last summer that the Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee had received preferential treatment from Countrywide. At first, Mr. Dodd denied everything. Later, he conceded that he'd been given special treatment but thought it was "more of a courtesy."

Heck, we'd all love the kind of courtesy that would have saved Mr. Dodd $75,000 over the life of the two loans he refinanced to the tune of $800,000, according to an analysis by Portfolio magazine. The savings came from rock-bottom interest rates and a free "float-down" -- the right to borrow at a lower rate if interest rates fall before you've closed on the loan.
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On Monday, with interest rates -- even for non-VIPs -- near historic lows, Mr. Dodd announced that he would refinance the sweetheart loans with another lender. The rates on the two Friends of Angelo loans were 4.5% and 4.25%, so the Senator will probably end up paying a bit more than he is now. But getting out from under the original loans doesn't shed any light on the key question: Whether Mr. Dodd knew that he got the red-carpet treatment because of his central role in regulating the financial industry. That's what former Countrywide employee Robert Feinberg has claimed to us and others.

We don't know whether the documents Mr. Dodd briefly showed yesterday illuminate this mystery or not, because he didn't release them to us, or to the public or his constituents. Perhaps the reporters he allowed to take a quick peak will tell us more. What he did release to everyone was a set of fact sheets that purport to show there was nothing favorable about the terms Mr. Dodd and his wife received from Countrywide, along with a consultant's report that reaches the same conclusion. Mr. Dodd's office did not respond to our request for the documents themselves, which he promised to release more than six months ago.

But consultant reports -- prepared at the behest of a law firm hired by Mr. Dodd to help him through the Countrywide mess -- tell us nothing about what Mr. Dodd knew and when he knew it. Instead, they are an attempt to change the subject. Mr. Feinberg has said that Friends of Angelo were regularly reminded that they were getting special treatment -- otherwise, what was the point? And he claims to have Countrywide documents that prove that Mr. Dodd was aware that Countrywide had done him favors. Those documents may or may not be among those that Mr. Dodd played peek-a-boo with Monday, but we still don't know. Mr. Dodd said he's "sorry" he didn't release the documents sooner -- just not sorry enough to actually release them, apparently.

Countrywide was for years the biggest single customer of Fannie Mae, the giant government-sponsored mortgage securitizer that has since gone into federal conservatorship. Much of Countrywide's business was built around its ability to sell loans to Fannie, and Mr. Mozilo helped push Fannie to accept dodgier and dodgier paper. Mr. Dodd in turn supported this goal by pressing Fannie to do more for "affordable" housing.

This nexus between Mr. Dodd's public duties and Countrywide's interests is a serious matter involving the Senator's personal ethics and accountability to taxpayers who will be paying for Fannie's bad loans for years to come. If, as Mr. Dodd claims, he has nothing to hide, then why is he still hiding it?

Congress's Phony War on Torture
Why not ban waterboarding once and for all?

When Leon Panetta comes before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday about his nomination to head the Central Intelligence Agency, he ought to be asked tough questions about the things he's said about torture. And he will.

At a time when key congressional Democrats are backing calls to investigate Bush administration officials for war crimes, it would help if our elected representatives first answered the tough questions themselves. But they won't. And therein lies the key to understanding contemporary congressional morality.
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For the past few years, no word has been more casually thrown about than "torture." At the same time, no word has been less precisely defined. That suits Congress just fine, because it allows members to take a pass on defining the law while reserving the right to second-guess the poor souls on the front lines who actually have to make decisions about what the law means.

Last February, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid thumped loudly when they sent George W. Bush a bill that would have limited the CIA to the interrogation techniques found in the Army Field Manual -- knowing full well that he would veto it. Now they have a Democratic president who says he shares their views. So why not send him a bill declaring once and for all that waterboarding and other interrogation techniques constitute torture?

Manifestly our system of government gives them the right to do so. As CIA Director Michael Hayden noted in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in September 2007, the "CIA operates only within the space given to us by the American people. . . . That space is defined by the policy makers we elect and the laws our representatives pass."

Of course, defining that space would require something in short supply in Washington: an adult conversation. In such a conversation, good men and women could present the case for enhanced interrogation without having their words twisted and finding themselves held up in public as latter-day Torquemadas. Such a conversation might also begin by examining the reigning assumption of today's debate: that context and circumstances have nothing to say about what we call torture.

This is not the reasoning we apply in other areas. Consider a police officer who kills a criminal in a justifiable shooting. We do not call that murder, because the circumstances surrounding the act determine our judgment of that act. If that's true for something as serious as killing, is it really impossible that similar reasoning might apply to interrogation practices that leave no permanent physical or mental damage?

At times, even critics inadvertently make the point. When it is argued, for example, that Navy Seals have undergone waterboarding as part of their training, the response is, well, waterboarding someone as part of his military training is different from waterboarding someone in custody. Yes: Of course it is. In the real world, circumstances and context are crucial to our moral judgments.

While we're at it, let's forget about the theoretical ticking time bomb. Instead, consider a real assertion: Leaders in our intelligence community have declared that the intelligence gained from enhanced interrogations of high-value terrorists have helped save innocent lives.

You don't believe them? Fine. Bring in the people who know -- behind closed doors if you want them to speak honestly and avoid spilling classified information. And then come to an informed conclusion.

In a better day, Congress would allow the executive branch a great deal of latitude during a time of war. We, however, do not live in a better day. In our day, senators and congressmen call for inquisitions of people who operate within a vague torture statute that Congress could easily clarify if it wanted.


A year ago, the Speaker of the House expressed herself thus: "Failing to legally prohibit the use of waterboarding and other harsh techniques," she said, "undermines our nation's moral authority, puts American military and diplomatic personnel at risk, and undermines the quality of intelligence."

So what's stopping her? The ban President Barack Obama has put in place is not a law but an executive order that can be reversed. This order came, moreover, with a huge back door in the form of a "task force" that will study whether eliminating waterboarding and other enhanced techniques will affect our intelligence needs.

If Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Reid believe their own public statements that waterboarding and other techniques are both torture and ineffective, they ought to incorporate their words into a law that takes these practices off the table forever.

That, of course, would mean a vote that would force lawmakers to face up to the real-life consequences of their actions -- and submit those actions to the judgment of the American people.

And as Mr. Obama is learning, the one thing that frightens Congress more than al Qaeda is accountability.

BUSY BUSY BUSY, yeah whatever
As practitioners of Bokononism, the religion created by Kurt Vonnegut in the book "Cat's Cradle," like to say when contemplating the complicated machinery of life: "Busy, busy, busy."

Obama's Moralizing Tone May Not Wear Well
How often do Americans want to hear how misguided they were before his arrival?



By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ

Two days into his presidency, Barack Obama delivered on his most celebrated and ardently pledged campaign promise -- the imposition of stringent limitations on the ways in which U.S. agents can question terror suspects, an executive order mandating the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, and the freezing of all detainee prosecutions.

That last request brought an eloquent reply from Col. James Pohl, Guantanamo's chief military judge, who promptly said no. He declared the directive to freeze all trials "not reasonable" -- a description that could as well apply to the whole of the administration's program for our moral cleansing and reformation in intelligence gathering. Col. Pohl refused, specifically, to delay the Feb. 9 arraignment of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri -- accused Saudi master-planner of the USS Cole bombing that killed 17 American sailors and a cause célèbre for the American Civil Liberties Union. In its characteristically nuanced style, the ACLU declared, through executive director Anthony Romero, that the judge's ruling was the work of "Bush hangers-on in the Defense Department."


Mr. Obama, of course, isn't likely to be deterred by an insurrection from a military court judge. His view of America's new position in the world -- following the announcement of those orders -- was amply clear, its tone familiar. America had entered upon a new day -- we once were lost and now we're found, a people restored to the paths of principle and honor. Hillary Clinton, speaking as secretary of state, would a few days later add her voice to the general thanksgiving for our rebirth, declaring, "There is a great exhalation of breath going on in the world."

To hear Mr. Obama speak now on matters like the national defense is to recognize that the leader now in the White House is in every respect the person he seemed on the campaign trail: a man of immense moral certitude, prone to an abstract idealism, and pronouncements that range between the rational and the otherworldly.

That's not counting the occasional touches of pure rubbish. Having, on the second day of his presidency, issued executive orders effectively undermining efforts to extract (from captured al Qaeda operatives) intelligence essential to the prevention of terror attacks -- and in addition seriously hampering the prosecution of terrorist detainees -- Mr. Obama argued that it was just by such steps that we strengthened our security. In his own words: "It is precisely our ideals that give us the strength and the moral high ground to be able to effectively deal with the unthinking violence that we see emanating from terrorist organizations around the world."

What can this mean? What moral high ground, exactly, would have enabled us to deter the designs of the religious fanatics in search of martyrdom and the slaughter of as many Americans as possible on September 11?

So much had happened in Washington that week -- so much speechifying and celebration -- it was easy to tune out that pronouncement, particularly since we'd heard its like so often during Mr. Obama's presidential run. It was of a piece with those assertions, emphasized the length of his campaign, that it was not our strength in arms but our principles that had made us a great nation.

During his grim inaugural address -- never has the promise of a nation's rebirth sounded so cheerless -- he was similarly emphatic as he touched on the issue of our defense, proclaiming that "we will not give up our ideals for expediency's sake." It was a line that evoked a loud upsurge of applause from his audience.

They had heard in it again, Mr. Obama's most dramatic and familiar campaign charge, delivered now in shorthand that needed no spelling out: The day of the Bush administration's machinations against our sacred ideals, against democracy itself, all in the name of our security, was now over. In this new day of our national salvation, then -- in a post 9/11 America that had seen 3,000 of its inhabitants murdered by terrorists -- it was now acceptable to characterize strenuous efforts to avert more such catastrophes as "expediency." It was not only acceptable, but proof of a higher moral intelligence.

The generation of Americans who had faced down fascism and communism understood, Mr. Obama further explained on Inauguration Day, that power alone could not protect us. They understood that our security came not just from missiles and tanks but from "sturdy alliances" and "enduring convictions" -- it emanated from "the tempering quality of humility and restraint."


It's impossible to know what kind of history Mr. Obama has been reading but this much at least is true -- the generation he describes knew the importance of sturdy alliances all right. There was that one, for instance, between the American leader, Franklin Roosevelt, and the British, Winston Churchill. Both of them, along with their countrymen, were driven by one enduring conviction -- that fascism should be eradicated from the face of the earth and a total war of destruction waged on Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany until their surrender. It would be hard to find, in their pursuit of that purpose, any hint of that tempering quality of humility and restraint. Not that it isn't entertaining to imagine Roosevelt extending the hand of friendship and conciliation to Hirohito, or Churchill proposing to raise a glass and talk things over with Hitler.

It's been tempting to ascribe Mr. Obama's orders on terrorist detentions, interrogations and Guantanamo to his campaign promises. Not to mention the pressure of that political constituency whose chief enterprise has been these many years to portray the war on terror as an illicit enterprise, conducted by agents of government bent on robbing innocent Americans of their constitutional rights and instilling baseless fears -- and that has succeeded, with the invaluable aid of a like-minded quarter of the media, in presenting a picture of Guantanamo as a hell on earth akin to Auschwitz.

Mr. Obama, who has always been much better than his vocal supporters on the far left, better than the cadres in MoveOn.Org, is no extremist. Still, there is no reason to think that his views on security issues and Guantanamo and interrogations, his tendency to minimize the central importance of armed might, are not deeply rooted. They are clearly core beliefs.

And that, along with those trumpeting declarations to the world that new leadership had now come to the United States, that we were now a nation worthy of the world's trust -- those speeches suggesting that after years of darkness America had now been rescued, just barely, from the abyss -- will be in the end this president's Achilles' heel. Those are not, Mr. Obama may discover, tones that wear well in the course of a presidency.

How Government Prolonged the Depression
Policies that decreased competition in product and labor markets were especially destructive.


The New Deal is widely perceived to have ended the Great Depression, and this has led many to support a "new" New Deal to address the current crisis. But the facts do not support the perception that FDR's policies shortened the Depression, or that similar policies will pull our nation out of its current economic downturn.
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A man selling apples during the Great Depression.

The goal of the New Deal was to get Americans back to work. But the New Deal didn't restore employment. In fact, there was even less work on average during the New Deal than before FDR took office. Total hours worked per adult, including government employees, were 18% below their 1929 level between 1930-32, but were 23% lower on average during the New Deal (1933-39). Private hours worked were even lower after FDR took office, averaging 27% below their 1929 level, compared to 18% lower between in 1930-32.

Even comparing hours worked at the end of 1930s to those at the beginning of FDR's presidency doesn't paint a picture of recovery. Total hours worked per adult in 1939 remained about 21% below their 1929 level, compared to a decline of 27% in 1933. And it wasn't just work that remained scarce during the New Deal. Per capita consumption did not recover at all, remaining 25% below its trend level throughout the New Deal, and per-capita nonresidential investment averaged about 60% below trend. The Great Depression clearly continued long after FDR took office.

Why wasn't the Depression followed by a vigorous recovery, like every other cycle? It should have been. The economic fundamentals that drive all expansions were very favorable during the New Deal. Productivity grew very rapidly after 1933, the price level was stable, real interest rates were low, and liquidity was plentiful. We have calculated on the basis of just productivity growth that employment and investment should have been back to normal levels by 1936. Similarly, Nobel Laureate Robert Lucas and Leonard Rapping calculated on the basis of just expansionary Federal

So what stopped a blockbuster recovery from ever starting? The New Deal. Some New Deal policies certainly benefited the economy by establishing a basic social safety net through Social Security and unemployment benefits, and by stabilizing the financial system through deposit insurance and the Securities Exchange Commission. But others violated the most basic economic principles by suppressing competition, and setting prices and wages in many sectors well above their normal levels. All told, these antimarket policies choked off powerful recovery forces that would have plausibly returned the economy back to trend by the mid-1930s.

The most damaging policies were those at the heart of the recovery plan, including The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which tossed aside the nation's antitrust acts and permitted industries to collusively raise prices provided that they shared their newfound monopoly rents with workers by substantially raising wages well above underlying productivity growth. The NIRA covered over 500 industries, ranging from autos and steel, to ladies hosiery and poultry production. Each industry created a code of "fair competition" which spelled out what producers could and could not do, and which were designed to eliminate "excessive competition" that FDR believed to be the source of the Depression.

These codes distorted the economy by artificially raising wages and prices, restricting output, and reducing productive capacity by placing quotas on industry investment in new plants and equipment. Following government approval of each industry code, industry prices and wages increased substantially, while prices and wages in sectors that weren't covered by the NIRA, such as agriculture, did not. We have calculated that manufacturing wages were as much as 25% above the level that would have prevailed without the New Deal. And while the artificially high wages created by the NIRA benefited the few that were fortunate to have a job in those industries, they significantly depressed production and employment, as the growth in wage costs far exceeded productivity growth.

These policies continued even after the NIRA was declared unconstitutional in 1935. There was no antitrust activity after the NIRA, despite overwhelming FTC evidence of price-fixing and production limits in many industries, and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 gave unions substantial collective-bargaining power. While not permitted under federal law, the sit-down strike, in which workers were occupied factories and shut down production, was tolerated by governors in a number of states and was used with great success against major employers, including General Motors in 1937.

The downturn of 1937-38 was preceded by large wage hikes that pushed wages well above their NIRA levels, following the Supreme Court's 1937 decision that upheld the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act. These wage hikes led to further job loss, particularly in manufacturing. The "recession in a depression" thus was not the result of a reversal of New Deal policies, as argued by some, but rather a deepening of New Deal polices that raised wages even further above their competitive levels, and which further prevented the normal forces of supply and demand from restoring full employment. Our research indicates that New Deal labor and industrial policies prolonged the Depression by seven years.

By the late 1930s, New Deal policies did begin to reverse, which coincided with the beginning of the recovery. In a 1938 speech, FDR acknowledged that the American economy had become a "concealed cartel system like Europe," which led the Justice Department to reinitiate antitrust prosecution. And union bargaining power was significantly reduced, first by the Supreme Court's ruling that the sit-down strike was illegal, and further reduced during World War II by the National War Labor Board (NWLB), in which large union wage settlements were limited by the NWLB to cost-of-living increases. The wartime economic boom reflected not only the enormous resource drain of military spending, but also the erosion of New Deal labor and industrial policies.

By 1947, through a combination of NWLB wage restrictions and rapid productivity growth, we have calculated that the large gap between manufacturing wages and productivity that emerged during the New Deal had nearly been eliminated. And since that time, wages have never approached the severely distorted levels that prevailed under the New Deal, nor has the country suffered from such abysmally low employment.

The main lesson we have learned from the New Deal is that wholesale government intervention can -- and does -- deliver the most unintended of consequences. This was true in the 1930s, when artificially high wages and prices kept us depressed for more than a decade, it was true in the 1970s when price controls were used to combat inflation but just produced shortages. It is true today, when poorly designed regulation produced a banking system that took on too much risk.

President Barack Obama and Congress have a great opportunity to produce reforms that do return Americans to work, and that provide a foundation for sustained long-run economic growth and the opportunity for all Americans to succeed. These reforms should include very specific plans that update banking regulations and address a manufacturing sector in which several large industries -- including autos and steel -- are no longer internationally competitive. Tax reform that broadens rather than narrows the tax base and that increases incentives to work, save and invest is also needed. We must also confront an educational system that fails many of its constituents. A large fiscal stimulus plan that doesn't directly address the specific impediments that our economy faces is unlikely to achieve either the country's short-term or long-term goals.

Mr. Cole is professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Ohanian is professor of economics and director of the Ettinger Family Program in Macroeconomic Research at UCLA.