You are Say- yuuuvveedd!

H/T Newsbusters

Yesterday and Today

The clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy's will to be imposed on him.

- Sun Tzu

President Obama yesterday:

We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

President Obama today:

Judge Suspends Guantanamo Cases at Obama's Request
By Peter Finn,Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, January 21, 2009; 2:07 PM

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, Jan. 21 -- A U.S. military judge Wednesday suspended the trial of five detainees accused of involvement in plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, acceding to a request from military prosecutors in accordance with a directive from the new Obama administration late Tuesday.

The suspension halts until late May the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the avowed mastermind of the Sept. 11 plot, and four other accused al-Qaeda members, even though Mohammed and three of the four objected to the delay.

In Washington, meanwhile, aides to President Obama were preparing an executive order that would begin the process of shutting down a detention facility at the Guantanamo Bay naval base for captured terrorist suspects. According to the Associated Press, the draft executive order calls for closing the detention center within a year. It was not immediately known when Obama would issue such an order.

Yes, indeed, from behind the Resolute Desk, on his first day in office and his first act as Commander in Chief, watch our enemies cower in fear and shrink in defeat and hear the lamentations of their women as they behold the unwavering power of the new president . His is an unapologetically strong and unbroken spirit, entirely unlike that pussy Gov. Bush.

Tom Friedman is An Ass, Still

There is no better way to begin the New Era of Hopeful Change than to turn to one of the high priests of Hopeful Change, New York Times Colonostimist Tom Friedman:

But we cannot let this be the last mold we break, let alone the last big mission we accomplish. Now that we have overcome biography, we need to write some new history — one that will reboot, revive and reinvigorate America. That, for me, was the essence of Obama’s inaugural speech and I hope we — and he — are really up to it.

Indeed, dare I say, I hope Obama really has been palling around all these years with that old Chicago radical Bill Ayers. I hope Obama really is a closet radical.

Not radical left or right, just a radical, because this is a radical moment. It is a moment for radical departures from business as usual in so many areas. We can’t thrive as a country any longer by coasting on our reputation, by postponing solutions to every big problem that might involve some pain and by telling ourselves that dramatic new initiatives — like a gasoline tax, national health care or banking reform — are too hard or “off the table.” [Gosh, how positively radical and yet somehow lefty - SBD] So my most fervent hope about President Obama is that he will be as radical as this moment — that he will put everything on the table.

Oh, dare to dream, Mr. Friedman, dare to dream! Again you deftly demonstrate the left's cozy relationship and adoration of its heroes and old soldiers, such as Mr. Ayers. Mr. Ayers continues to have cache and street cred - a man who has produced nothing, helped no one, and spent his life attempting to destroy this country, of late by focusing, with President Obama, on the tender intellects of its children with "education reform."

Maybe, Mr. Friedman, President Obama will be as radical as your incredibly imaginative and radical buddy Ramalinga Raju, the Indian Bernie Madoff.

I've added something I got from my friend Ramalinga Raju from Satyam, the Indian company. We [!?!]decided that the greatest economic competition in the world going forward is not going to be between countries and countries. And it's not going to be between companies and companies. The greatest economic competition going forward is going to be between you and your own imagination. Your ability to act on your imagination is going to be so decisive in driving your future and the standard of living in your country. So the school, the state, the country that empowers, nurtures, enables imagination among its students and citizens, that's who's going to be the winner.

Raju's bail hearing is on January 22. Wonder how imaginative the Indian Court will be?

There always seem to be a bail hearing in the past of liberal's heroes and imagineers.

And So Begins the Occupation

Bush Legacy

The American Thinker:

It can be stated without fear of serious argument that no previous president has been treated as brutally, viciously, and unfairly as George W. Bush.

Bush 43 endured a deliberate and planned assault on everything he stood for, everything he was involved in, everything he tried to accomplish. Those who worked with him suffered nearly as much (and some even more -- at least one,Scooter Libby, was convicted on utterly specious charges in what amounts to a show trial).

His detractors were willing to risk the country's safety, its economic health, and the very balance of the democratic system of government in order to get at him. They were out to bring him down at all costs, or at the very least destroy his personal and presidential reputation. At this they have been half successful, at a high price for the country and its government.

Bush is alone at being attacked and denied support from all quarters -- even from many members of his own party. No single media source, excepting talk radio, was ever in his corner. Struggling actors and comics revived their careers though attacks on Bush. A disturbed woman perhaps a half step above the status of a bag lady parked outside his Crawford home to throw curses at him and was not only not sent on her way but joined by hundreds of others with plenty of spare time on their hands, an event covered in minute-by-minute detail by major media.

At least two films, one produced play, and a novel (by the odious Nicholson Baker, a writer with the distinction of dropping further down the ladder of decency with each work -- from sophisticated porn in Vox to degrading the war against Hitler in last year's Human Smoke) appeared calling for his assassination -- a new wrinkle in presidential criticism, and one that the left will regret. And let's not forget that tribune of the voiceless masses, Michael Moore, whose Fahrenheit 911 once marked the end-all and be-all of political satire but today is utterly forgotten.

The question is then posed:

What were the reasons for this hatred and the campaign that grew out of it? We can ask that question as often as we like, but we'll get no rational answer.

[...]

As in all such cases, Bush hatred involves a number of factors that will be debated by historians for decades to come. But one component that cannot be overlooked is ideology, specifically the ideologization of American politics. It is no accident that the three most hated recent presidents are all Republican. These campaigns are yet another symptom of the American left's collapse into an ideological stupor characterized by pseudo-religious impulses, division of the world into black and white entities, and the unleashing of emotions beyond any means of rational control. The demonization of Bush -- and Reagan, and Nixon -- is the flip-side of the messianic response to Barack Obama.

There's nothing new about any of this. It's present in Orwell's 1984 in the "Five-Minute Hate" against the imaginary Emmanuel Goldstein, himself based on Leon Trotsky. The sole novel factor is its adaptation as a conscious tactic in democratic politics. That is unprecedented, and a serious cause for concern.

And how shall Obama fare?

Being a Democrat, Obama has little to worry about, even with the far-left elements of his coalition beginning to sour on him. The ideological machinery is too unwieldy to swing around in order to target a single figure. Even if circumstances force him to violate the deeper tenets of his following, personal factors -- not limited to skin color -- will serve to protect him.

The Bush Legacy

The Wall Street Journal assesses the Bush Economy, about which the MSM and the Neo-Socialists will lie and misinterpret on their way to complete government control of our economic lives:

President Bush is leaving office amid the worst recession in 5 years, and naturally his economic policies are getting the blame. But before we move on to the era of Obamanomics, it's important to understand what really happened during the Bush years -- not least so we don't repeat the same mistakes.

Mr. Bush has tried to explain events with one of his populist aphorisms: "Wall Street got drunk and we got a hangover." The remark is ruefully amusing and has an element of truth. But it also reveals how little the President comprehends about the source of his Administration's economic undoing. To extend his metaphor, Who does Mr. Bush think was serving the liquor?

Democrats like to claim the 1990s were a golden age while the Bush years have been disastrous. But as the nearby chart shows, Mr. Bush inherited a recession. The dot-com bubble had burst in 2000, and the economy was sinking even before the shock of 9/11, the corporate scandals and Sarbanes-Oxley. Mr. Bush's original tax-cut proposal was designed in part as insurance against such a downturn.

However, to win over Senate Democrats, Mr. Bush both phased in the tax rate reductions and settled for politically popular but economically feckless tax rebate checks. Those checks provided a short-term lift to consumer spending but no real boost to risk-taking or business investment, which was still recovering from the tech implosion. By late 2002, the economy was struggling again -- which is when Mr. Bush proposed his second round of tax cuts.

This time the tax rate reductions were immediate, and they included cuts in capital gains and dividends designed to spur business incentives. As the tax cuts became law in late May 2003, the recovery began in earnest. Growth averaged nearly 4% over the next three years, the jobless rate fell from 6.3% in June 2003 to 4.4% in October 2006, and real wages began to grow despite rising food and energy prices. The 2003 tax cut was the high point of Bush economic policy.

Mr. Bush's spending record is less admirable, especially during his first term. He indulged the majority Republicans on Capitol Hill, refusing to veto overspending and giving in to their demand that the Medicare prescription drug benefit include only modest market reforms. Even those reforms have helped to restrain drug costs, but now Democrats are set to repeal them and the main Bush legacy will be the new taxpayer liabilities.

Nonetheless, the budget deficit did fall mid-decade, as tax revenues soared with the expansion. In fiscal 2007, the deficit hit $161 billion, or an economically trivial 1.2% of
GDP. That seems like a distant memory after the bailout blowout of the last few months, but the point is that the Bush tax cuts aren't responsible for the deficits. Before the recession hit, federal tax revenues had climbed above their postwar average of 18.3% of GDP.

Which brings us back to Mr. Bush's "hangover." While his Administration was handling the fiscal levers, the Federal
Reserve was pushing the monetary accelerator to the floor. In reaction to the dot-com implosion and the collapse in business investment, Alan Greenspan rapidly cut interest rates to spur housing and consumer spending. In June 2003,
even as the tax cuts were passing and the economy took off, he cut the fed funds rate to 1% and kept it there for a year.

His stimulus worked -- far too well. The money boom created a commodity price spike as well as a subsidy for credit across the economy. Economist John Taylor of Stanford has analyzed the magnitude of this monetary mistake in a new paper that assesses government's contribution to the financial panic. The second chart compares the actual fed funds rate this decade with what it would have been had the Fed stayed within the policy lanes of the previous 20 years.

"This extra easy policy was responsible for accelerating the housing boom and thereby ultimately leading to the housing bust," writes Mr. Taylor, who worked in the first-term Bush
Treasury, though not on monetary affairs, and is known for the "Taylor rule" for determining how central banks should adjust interest rates.

By pushing all of this excess credit into the economy, the Fed created a housing and mortgage mania that Wall Street was only too happy to be part of. Yes, many on the Street abandoned their normal risk standards. But they were goaded by an enormous subsidy for debt. Wall Street did get "drunk" but Washington had set up the open bar.

For that matter, most everyone else was also drinking the free booze: from homebuyers who put nothing down for a loan, to a White House that bragged about record home ownership, to the Democrats who promoted and protected Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (Those two companies helped turbocharge the mania by using a taxpayer subsidy to attract trillions of dollars of foreign capital into U.S. housing.) No one wanted the party to end, though sooner or later it had to.

While the Fed is most to blame, the Administration encouraged the credit excesses. It populated the Fed Board of Governors with Mr. Greenspan's protégés, notably Ben Bernanke and Donald Kohn, who helped to create the mania and even now deny all responsibility. Meantime, Mr. Bush's three Treasury Secretaries knew little about the subject, and if anything were inclined to support easier money and a weaker dollar in the name of reducing the trade deficit. We know because numerous Bush officials sneered at the monetary warnings in these columns going back to 2003.

When the bust finally arrived with a vengeance in 2007, the political timing couldn't have been worse. Mr. Bush tried to rally with one more fiscal "stimulus," but he repeated his
2001 mistake and agreed to another round of tax rebates. They did little good. The Administration might have prevented the worst of the panic had it sought some sort of TARP-like financing for the banking system months or a year earlier than it did last autumn. But neither the Treasury nor the FDIC seemed to appreciate how big the banking system's problems were. Their financial triage was well meaning but came too late and in a frenzy that invited mistakes.

This history is crucial to understand, both for the Democrats who now assume the levers of power and for Republicans who will want to return to power some day. Mr. Bush and his team did many things right after inheriting one bubble. They were ruined by monetary excess that created a second, more
dangerous credit mania. They forgot one of the main lessons of Reaganomics, which is the importance of stable money.

I Better Just Get A Tall

These two things are not unrelated:

Caffeine Can Cause Hallucinations
By LiveScience Staff
posted: 13 January 2009 07:32 pm ET

People who take in the caffeine equivalent of three cups of brewed coffee (or seven cups of instant) are more likely to hallucinate, a new study suggests.

The researchers found that people with a caffeine intake that high, whether it came from coffee, tea, chocolate or caffeinated energy drinks or pills, had a three-times-higher tendency to hear voices and see things that were not there than those who consumed the equivalent of a half-cup of brewed coffee (or one cup of instant coffee). Though most people who drink loads of coffee are not known to hallucinate seriously, when these types of experiences interfere with daily functioning, they are considered to be psychotic.

Biden Outlines Plans to Do More With Less Power
By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — He was in the Senate for 36 years and visited the White House under seven presidents. But Joseph R. Biden Jr. has never seen the inside of the vice president’s office in the West Wing. “I never thought a lot about the vice presidency,” he said, “until I was asked to go on the ticket.”

[...]

He said he would bring more to the job than any of his predecessors, except possibly Lyndon B. Johnson. “I know as much or more than Cheney,” Mr. Biden said. “I’m the most experienced vice president since anybody.”

Caving In

Wall Street Journal Editor Jim Taranto extracts these two very important Obama quotes from the ether to remind us what a liar, fabulist and punk Barack Obama is.

"When John McCain said we could just 'muddle through' in Afghanistan, I argued for more resources and more troops to finish the fight against the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11, and made clear that we must take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants if we have them in our sights. John McCain likes to say that he'll follow bin Laden to the gates of hell--but he won't even go to the cave where he lives."--Sen. Barack Obama, Democratic National Convention speech, Aug. 28, 2008

Here we see the unconvincing, ballswaggering Obama during the campaign (unconvincing to at least to 46% of voters), when he was lecturing those pussies Bush and Cheney and McCain to stop dicking around in Iraq and to send large quantities of special forces into Pakistan to take out Bin Laden and"finish the fight." Finish the fight? He had no idea then who we are at war with and still doesn't. Flash forward a few months and we have this:

"I think that we have to so weaken his infrastructure that, whether he is technically alive or not, he is so pinned down that he cannot function. My preference obviously would be to capture or kill him. But if we have so tightened the noose that he's in a cave somewhere and can't even communicate with his operatives, then we will meet our goal of protecting America."--President-elect Barack Obama, CBS News interview, Jan. 14, 2009

Well. See what a few intelligence briefings can do for you. One could say that Obama has "grown in office," even though he hasn't yet taken the office. At least we can rest easy now that Obama seems to be backing off his campaign pledge to invade nuclear armed Pakistan. Obama still evidences a fatal understanding of our mortal enemy.

He remains untutored on some basic principles of enemy management. First, he seems to conflate the battle against the Taliban and the battle against Al Qaeda. Focusing just on Bin Laden here, to the extent that Bin Laden is "technically" alive, and to the extent that a thorough delousing of his cave complex is not yet practicable, it would not do to completely tighten the noose and shut him off from his operatives. Yes, we all want to see Bin Laden captured, brought to the US and taken on a magical mystery tour through our legal system for years and years until he is finally sentenced to death, a sentence that can't be taken against him because by then all forms of capital punishment will be deemed cruel and unusual, so he'll sit in Super Max next to other "lost souls."

So, if you know you have not killed the leader and the enemy has not revealed a new leader, then they will continue to look to and continue a method of communication with the leader to ensure they are acting by his design. (And anyone pretending to be Bin Laden needs the same dynamic to work for him or he's out of job). Generally, Al Qeada is a cell based movement characterised by centralized decision making and decentralized execution. To the extent that they believe Bin Laden is alive, then it is in our interests to allow lines of communication to stay open for a number of reasons. First, to ensure a thorough understanding of the extent and scope of the network and its functions. Second, to forestall the development of strong leadership among the mainline cells in Western capitals and the self-starters in places like Iraq. We need them to be nervous nellies, afraid to make bold moves without hearing what Uncle Binny has to say. If Bin Laden is believed to be dead, then it implies a leadership vacuum which, while creating the impression of dislocation and chaos in the organization, actually makes the practice of rolling it up more difficult as splinter cells form and diverge and perhaps choose to concentrate on more generalized mayhem as opposed to putting on a big show. Al Qaeda is big on big attacks, which by design take longer to plan and leave more opportunity for discovery. Ironic, but their big attack philosophy is a key weakness for them as far as preventing discovery. Our craft has changed considerably since 2001. Third, the decentralization of execution causes delay as these big attacks must be green-lighted from the cave. Cells scrambling to maintain long lines of communication are more likely to reveal themselves and allow us to interdict them where they matter - well away from the caves of Waziristan.

Perhaps that's next Wednesday's morning briefing.

New Chance and Community Chest Cards

This is brilliant. Insert these new, timely Chance and Community Chest cards into your Monopoly Game set and surreptitiously teach your children what they will not learn in school.

Rich Corinthian Leather - RIP

Saul Menowitz informs Ruminations that Ricardo Montalban has passed from this world.

All he can say is this - KHAANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!

Montalban is one of those actors whose passing reminds a certain generation just how old they are. SBD began watching prodigious amounts of television in the early 70s and Montalban was a near constant - Hawaii Five-O, Wonder Woman, Colombo, Zorro, and the high water mark of 70's television - Fantasy Island. His work as Armando in Escape from the Planet of the Apes and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes goes unchallenged. And then of course, there was that rerun of Star Trek you saw for the first time, featuring the future Bondian-type villain - Khan Noonian Singh. It made perfect sense that he would play a future superman. A thrill would shoot down your leg when watching old crap movies and television shows from the 50s and early 60s and there he would be, those trademarked jowls in full firmness, playing some stereotypical Spanish lothario or stooge. And now he's gone and those are your years that are gone as well.

Less well known than his Corinthian leather-lined acting jobs, Montalban was a devout Catholic, was honored by the Vatican for his good works, and was married to his wife for 63 years, although it defies reason to think he did not have a chicka or two on the side.

He also had two other amazing skills - he could wear a rug like no one else - Shatner included - and he knew how to tie a nice Windsor knot.

Rest In Peace.

Uh, oh.

SBD is concerned that he did not score LOW enough!

Barack is very disappointed with me!


I only scored 20 on the Obama Test

State of Unprecedented Emergency

Well, it's martial law, friends. So unprecedented and costly and, apparently, unprecedentedly dangerous is the (unprecedented) Inauguration of (unprecedentedly named) Barack Hussein Obama as the 44th President of the United States that the only way to handle it is to declare it a national emergency and smash open another federal piggy bank. But, since we have been living under a virtual dictatorship lo these eight shameful and embarrassing years, it only makes sense that Obama's people would seek to maintain that aspect of the Bush Hunta, in addition to its general economic and national security policies and personnel and the chef. Don't forget the chef.

How is this not the biggest racist statement yet from white America (other than their racist act of voting for Obama because he is black and his election would assuage their White Guilt?) "Uh, oh, a black man is about to take the White House - better declare an emergency!!!!" You know, if a Republican did that it would be the end of the . . . , oh, wait a minute . . . As White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said,

"Because of this anticipated influx of people, declaring an emergency permits the federal government to provide additional requested support ... to ensure that the inauguration is not only safe and secure, but that the health and well-being of visitors is preserved."

Who do they think is crashing this party dressed in death and mayhem? Are they talking about the guests? Are they talking about the host not being able to manage the Unwashed Deluge? Talk about the low bigotry of soft expectations, or something to that effect. Honestly, if you have blown the catering budget wide open, just admit it and put out the call to the B-listers to kick in a little potluck here and there. And apparently, Obama has done quite well tallying subscriptions to his Day of Glory from a not unprecedented group of morons. The Wall Street Journal reports that, "A total of 207 fund-raisers have collected $24.8 million of the $27.3 million in contributions disclosed by Mr. Obama through Thursday, according to an analysis by nonpartisan campaign finance group Public Citizen." Apparently they have contributed so much that The Fashion House of Goodwill is the only morally acceptable source of ball regalia this year. These monies do not cover the expenses of Democratic-run governments in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware and D.C. to ensure the health and well-being of visitors. So many people are expected at all the historic events they have arranged that taxpayers need to kick in more money to pay for it. Those entirely unprecedented costs can be expected to run the entire cost of this unprecedented extravaganza above $100 million. That's more than twice what President Bush spent on his second coup d'etat. And, to the Professional Elite, spending that kind of money on a Republican was an unprecedented scandal.

Of course it's unprecedented nonsense to declare an emergency. Democrats simply want to ensure a further historical zenith attached to the ascendancy of Obama. If you don't get it, then you'll have to fuck off. For the Lore to take its place in the national psyche and to serve its purpose across this century as a beacon of unprecedented hope, the Obama Inauguration has to have been so unprecedented that every unprecedented step that could be taken had to be taken. Close the bridges! Shut down the city arteries! Commandeer the parking lots! Deploy every man, woman and child wielding a badge! Build a sound stage in front of the Lincoln Memorial bigger than the Lincoln Memorial! Close down the schools! Shut down the Beltway! Scare everyone away! But keep telling them it's the most historic national event to occur since the Founding itself and Being There may help you get a gold star when Obama's Mutaween stop you in the street and ask where you were when Obama was sworn in.

What's truly unprecedented is the cult of personality enveloping this man. Even more unprecedented is his total embrace of his own myth. Now that is an emergency unanswered.

Of course this entire post is really just sour grapes, but it's an unprecedented case of sour grapes!

Always Bet on Freedom

"Priorities for the Next President":

Ambassador Ryan Crocker, our envoy in Baghdad, put it best: “In the end, how we leave, and what we leave behind, will be more important than how we came.” The American project in Iraq can’t be allowed to fail. It is fundamental to the peace of that “Greater Middle East.” We must also retain the best of President George W. Bush’s “diplomacy of freedom”—the belief that Arabs and Muslims don’t have tyranny in their DNA. Americans may differ in their reading of Bush, but in
the Arab and Islamic world, he leaves behind a commendable legacy: the willingness to bet on freedom, the belief that our pact with autocracy in that region has not served us well. In Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, the American effort has not been in vain.

-- Fouad Ajami, Director of the Middle East Studies Program at The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University.

Run Away, Run Away!!!

Powerline provides some video, sourced from WeaselZippers, of the forces of totalitarian oppression marching in the streets of London. Essentially, it's eight or so shameful minutes of British bobbies walking hastily before a chanting mob of jihadis, while having various street items - traffic cones, sticks, signs - lobbed at their backs and being called cowards, about which is the only thing one could agree with those fascists. Although the British have a "run away, run away" policy history, those bobbies looked like, well, the Keystone cops scurrying down the street. Speed up the video for the full effect. You can't give ground like that, especially after the protesters start to throw stuff at you. They can march, but the minute they throw shit, you have to run them down with horses into Thames. But England has lost its confidence. It believes in nothing. It's police force is a mockery. Britain's only hope is MI5, the domestic spy department, which is a sick state of affairs to be in.

The protesters clearly wanted to fight the police so they could escalate and begin a thousand nights of burning cars like their brothers in the French banlieues. Those nights are coming anyway, which is why British authorities need to demonstrate resolve now. But they won't because they reflect their weak national government, which is wholly predicated now on not offending immigrant populations and actively working against their assimilation, even though those populations have emigrated for the sole purpose of destroying Britain and its western culture, albeit while on the dole the entire time. Ironically, Britain's nannies are doing this in the name of western democracy and freedom. British bureaucracy is fully geared towards a hyper-enforcement of immigrants "rights," which means in practice not allowing anything that "offends" them. Well, what offends them most is western culture and freedom.

Those marches are not so much about the Palestinians as they are about the Jews. The protests in western cities in the past week are not anti-Israel. They are anti-Jew. There is a huge difference. Western civilization rises or falls depending on how it treats its Jews. Jews are the ultimate assimilationists. They have survived by going along to get along. Western republicanism offered them the ability to live in the open as free and equal men and women. Sounds hokey, but given the long history as a people, their experience of freedom in the western world is a mere blip so far, and one following their darkest scrape with human evil. They are once again in a precarious position and to demonstrate any weakness in support of them is to give up ground to the totalitarians. That is where Europe is today. One can argue about Israeli tactics, strategy, mode of self-defense, influence on US policy, even the legitimacy of the Jewish state, but it doesn't matter to these nutters. Even if Israel had not been carved from the desert, the Jews would still be hated, hounded and be enemy number one, and to allow demonstrations like the one in London and other western capitals to go uncontested is a grim sign. It's one thing to hold up a sign saying "Israel Out of Gaza" - they tried that, remember? - and entirely another to hold up a sign that says "Palestine from the River to the Sea."

Crime of Commission

American Enterprise Institute's Kevin Hassett:

One reason the increase [in spending] is so dramatic is the mystery of compounding. Each year, Congress passed pork-laden expenditure bills, which became part of the long-run baseline the minute they became law. Each time that the federal government wasted a billion dollars, it created budget space to waste $1 billion again and again, ad infinitum.

That’s perhaps the scariest fact about next year’s budget. The skyrocketing spending of 2009 will be the CBO baseline for every year after that. It will be easy to provide health care to everyone; the budget space will be blocked out. Indeed, Congress can spend with impunity in years to come, covered by the protective shroud of the CBO baseline that this year delivers. We can ride big government spending and trillion-dollar deficits all the way to 2017, when the Social Security trust fund itself starts running deficits.

This year may establish a government-spending black hole with gravity strong enough to suck the U.S. economy over the event horizon. Such a spending path has two possible endgames. Neither is pretty.

The Federal Reserve could print enough money to accommodate all of that debt, in which case the dollar will collapse and the U.S. will be looking at a South-America-style run on its debt.

Or the U.S. government could get its fiscal act in order with higher taxes. For that to happen, income taxes would approximately have to double.

While advocates of Keynesian-style stimulus are correct that this economy is terrible enough to warrant dramatic action, it is hard to understand how such a fiscal path might help. So what if second-quarter gross domestic product blips up a little bit? What business is going to expand its operations with the mother of all tax hikes peeking over the horizon? If government spending provided such a wonderful boost to the economy, we would be in Nirvana already.

If we want to create optimism about our future, we need to provide a reason. Putting a ring road around every city in the U.S. will not accomplish that. The only sensible path is for the U.S. to put its long-term fiscal house in order. Without that, this year’s stimulus will likely be a historic flop.

Hassett then reveals his entire column to be a sick joke by proclaiming this bit of "good news":

The good news is that a bipartisan group of senators, led by Democrat Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Republican Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, is on the right track. Their idea is for Congress to empower a commission to make the tough choices about future benefits and taxes to restore sanity to the U.S. budget outlook, and then to fast-track the commission’s recommendations to an up-or-down vote. If Congress fails to take Conrad and Gregg seriously, we may all be headed for the bread line.

A Commission? No. A bipartisan Commission. Well, the timing is certainly right, what with a new Democrat president, who merely holds the entire hope of the world in his uncalloused hands, about to take his seat in the Oval Office and a Democrat-controlled House and Senate run by those unrepentant centrists Harry Pelosi and Nancy Reid. Why wouldn't they share power? Why wouldn't they hand over the power of the purse to a commission of, well, who exactly? No doubt there are BIG, BIG names on that list, all perfectly bipartisan and properly credentialed by the Ivy League, which has been unnecessarily excluded from formulating national policies and programs since the Carter years. Start Richard Ben-Veniste and Lee Hamilton. They look good on Commissions. Ben-Veniste has that Blago hair, which chicks dig, and Hamilton looks kinda like Ike.

Still, one should not be too pessimistic. It would be a tough sell for the American people, but if they'll vote for Obama, then anything is possible. But the Commission's work would need to be as open to the American people as the work of the Congress. How about turning it into a Broadway show? It could be the first big government stimulus project under Obama. A new Works Project Administration Federal Theater -- oops, sorry - Theatre Project. Every city could put on its own show. The real work of the Bipartisan Commission of Bipartisan Bipedals, all the hacking and slashing and "tough choice" making, would be instantly transcribed to the stage. David Mamet could write the scripts. Our children could be pressed into service as stage hands in exchange for college credit or tuition tax credits. Hollywood's prodigious propaganda machine could be volunteered into service, although they will expect certain tax breaks when filming comes around, otherwise they'll have to film in Toronto or Vancouver.

But perhaps there is a better way. Let these people who have been elected to office fight for their agenda, make laws on it, and impose it on the people who elected them. And if the People don't like it, they usually form their own ad hoc, informal committee every two or four years and make a fast track decision with an up or down vote on what they think of those elected people. We may all suffer in the meantime, which could be a longtime, but how the hell else are to we learn from our behavior.

The belief that committees of the unelected, who spare the elected from making tough choices or even stupid ones by allowing them to assign away their responsibility, can save us from ourselves is the worst sort of indictment of our Republic. It's the kind of crazy talk that makes messiahs of politicians. Such a Republic cannot stand for long. Nor should it.

The Battle for Liberty Requires Perpetual Vigilance

The Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal have released their 2009 Index of Economic Freedom. In the Foreward, WSJ Editorial Page Editor Paul Gigot sums up the present situation and what's at stake for those who champion economic freedom:

Thirty years ago, in the otherwise miserable decade of the 1970s, the modern era of free-market economic revival began. The reigning Keynesian economists lacked an explanation, much less a policy answer, for the stagflation of that decade. Free-marketers of various stripes—Chicago-school monetarists, supply-siders, deregulators—stepped into the breach by offering a revival of classical economics. Their prescriptions set the stage for Reaganomics in the U.S. and Margaret Thatcher’s success in the U.K., spreading eventually to China, India, and other once-socialist corners of the world. The result has been an astonishing era of innovation and prosperity, with literally hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty.

The daunting question as I write in late 2008 is whether that era is coming to a close. As an optimist by temperament, I like to think not. But there is no denying that the worst financial panic in 70 years has inspired fresh doubts about the utility of free markets and has led to serious policy setbacks. To prevent the collapse of the world banking system, governments have intervened in financial markets in ways not seen since the 1930s. In the U.S., the mortgage markets have essentially been nationalized. In Europe and the U.S., the government has injected public capital into the banking system.

As distasteful as it is, the need for public capital probably became inevitable once the panic become a global bank run and threatened a collapse of the entire financial system. However, the perils are obvious going forward. Politicians could seek to politicize the allocation of credit even more than they have through the likes of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And with the election of a new Democratic Administration in Washington amid a recession, the political stage is set for even greater government intervention across the entire economy if policymakers ignore the lessons of recent decades.

Our private financial elites certainly made many mistakes, not least in their failure to assess risk adequately. But the irony of this panic is that its main causes lie in failures of government. The original sin was monetary, in the form of excessive money creation by the U.S. Federal Reserve from 2002 through 2005.

The Fed created a subsidy for credit that produced asset bubbles in commodity prices and especially in housing. Facilitated by further government subsidies in housing through Fannie and Freddie and other policies, this credit boom produced a bubble in housing prices and mortgage-finance vehicles. When the bubble ultimately burst, the credit mania turned to panic and led to the events we have all been living through this year. Instead of anticipating problems at the most troubled institutions, Treasury and the Fed often moved in an ad hoc, arbitrary fashion that fed the panic.

Rather than admit its own mistakes, the political class in Europe and the U.S. wants to pin the blame on “deregulation.” The reality is that the financial institutions that made mistakes are some of the most regulated in the world. The fault lies with bad or feckless regulation, not the lack of it. Adam Smith in his ruthless fashion has already punished the biggest mistakes, remaking Wall Street without Congress having passed a single reform. Thanks to revived market discipline, the world is already moving to a safer, more stable financial system. Governments are nonetheless set to rewrite their financial rules, and we have to hope they do so in ways that don’t throttle innovation and the free flow of capital.

There are other policy dangers to watch. The Doha global trade round has stalled, and President-elect Barack Obama shows no signs of wanting to revive it. Taxes and spending in the U.S. are both likely to rise substantially, and the health care and energy industries are in for extensive new regulation or worse. Some European leaders want to use the excuse of the financial meltdown to impose a new global regulatory regime that could stifle competition and, ultimately, growth.

The good news, to the extent there is some, is that the benefits of economic liberty may have spread far enough in the past 30 years to prevent too much of a backlash. The financial panic has done great harm, but we have survived recessions in the past. If the U.S. makes policy mistakes, the rest of the world—especially in Asia—may choose not to follow. Already, the worldwide trend toward lower corporate tax rates means that even an Obama Administration may have no choice but to follow down that particular Laffer Curve. If the U.S. fails to lead on trade, the rest of the world will move to bilateral or regional pacts, as South Korea and Europe are already doing in the wake of Congress’s failure to approve the U.S.–South Korean free-trade agreement.

The abiding lesson of the current panic is that the battle for liberty requires perpetual vigilance. Ostensibly free-market policymakers in the U.S. lost their monetary policy discipline, and we are now paying a terrible price. The Index of Economic Freedom exists to chronicle how steep that price will be and to point the way back to policy wisdom.

Department of Ludicrosity

Are we a country of chilly pussies?

STEPHANOPOULOS: It has been pretty well-received in the Congress. But you're getting some push back as well, especially from Senate Democrats on the tax cut portions. Senator Tom Harkin said this is trickle down economics all
over again. They're focused especially on the business taxes.
Do you really believe those business tax cuts are going to work to create jobs? Or do you put them in so you could get Republican votes?

OBAMA: Well, let's look at the package as a whole, the bulk of the package is direct government spending. And here are a few things we're going to do. We're going to alternative energy production. We are going to weatherize 2 million homes. We are going to create a much more efficient energy system. . .

It strains credulity to think that at this point in our national story, at the tail end of the first decade of the new century, the American people are in such a state that a platform of the new president’s energy plan is direct government spending to “weatherize 2 million homes.” Presidents are strange creatures that get little factoids or action items or nuggets of motherly advice stuck on their brains. Jimmy Carter ludicrously lectured us to wear thicker sweaters, but he never bought them for us. President Bush claimed to have a certain amount of “political capital.” Approximately $1.50 worth, as it turns out. When they assume office, presidents certainly have political capital to tap into, but they also receive a stipend that covers the expenses associated with a certain number of ludicrous statements, but once the account is empty, that’s it. Obama is rapidly working through his hush money for ludicrosity, and he hasn’t even placed his hand upon the Lincoln Bible.

What if we don’t weatherize our homes? Is there a tax in the future to penalize it? Is there going to be a study on the effects of second hand chills? Obama has warned us that we can’t keep out homes at 72 degrees and still have the world love us. And how will these weatherizing subsidies be doled out? Will it entail a voucher or coupon, similar to the digital television transition coupons, which can be used to buy weather-stripping from Target or Amazon? And just what the hell does he mean by weatherizing the homes? Is he buying furnaces for people? Does he realize that rules and regulations must now be written? Will draftstoppers decorated with little kittens or frolicking puppies be compliant with these rules? Will there be a unit of the National Civilian Defence Corp - the Weatherizes, perhaps, wearing Patagonia jackets with NCDC emblazoned on the back - traipsing through the right kind of neighborhoods, kicking in doors and rolling out weather-stripping? Are we to see the formation of an Office of Weather-stripping in the Department of Energy?

Sounds ludicrous, eh?

No more ludicrous than the idea that it is the government’s business to directly spend money on weatherizing homes. This is one of those Freakonomics-like exercises that we will have to suffer through. Some clever dickwad will now provide a total dollars saved figure on the ramifications of weatherizing just 2 million homes and just imagine the savings if we doubled or tripled it? And that will be the mark of the Obama administration – forcing us to discuss the ludicrous.

First Taste

Santa's Butt Winter Porter

Source: Christmas present from sister who is presently on the "not-speaking with" list following family Christmas gathering.

Brewer: Ridgeway Brewing, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom

Marketing BS: "This special holiday porter is made for winter - rich and warming, the way they like it at the North Pole. It was inspired by this famous line from a well-loved children's storybook: 'And Santa sat on his great butt, enjoying a hardy brew . . .' In case you find that amusing, the brewer hastens to point out that in England "butt" refers to a certain sized barrel customarily used for beer - a very large barrel, in fact, holding 108 Imperial gallons. Back in the day it was quite a normal thing for a brewery to put its beer up in a large butt for storage. Still snikering, eh? Get your mind out of the gutter, or Santa will be skipping your house entirely this year."

Translation: We're fucking marketing geniuses by using a ribald reference to Santa's fat ass and using a picture of the little big keistered bastard in order to create a mirthful reaction in the beer case browser, thus ensuring a novelty sale around the holidays.

Setting: Den, under which is nesting some scratching, plotting flea-infested hellspawn.

Bottle: Rich brown cinnamon color, with a hint of coffee stain on a new white Brooks Brothers button down. The neck has an interesting inward curve, perfect for grasping the bottle with your thumb and the bird digit as you stumble down a street. Holds a pint and nine ounces. Not too naughty, not too nice.

Label: Features a big picture of Santa's ass. Frankly, one might suspect Santa's working a deuce just before departure while enjoying his brew and checking his lists.

The Cap: Upon release, nothing. Given it's name, one expects the bloody thing to fart. But, as quiet as a big-assed elf sneaking into your house . . . which is what you should expect from a porter (he wrote, not knowing dick about big assed porters).

Alcohol Content: 6 percent.

Method of Imbibation: A mug that holds exactly one pint and nine ounces of creamy brown Santa's ass juice.

First Swig: Flat as Mrs. Claus' butt. No head to speak of. Really no taste to speak of. It's a lot like Christmas - expectation, fancy wrapping, holiday merrymaking, but once opened, it's the light blue sweater from your mother-in-law that goes right into the AmVets donation bag. A lump of coal in a glass of water would provide more satisfaction.

Competition: Saul Menowitz' Hannukah Hynie Winter Lager

Recommendation: Makes a great novelty gift for siblings or to offer your hated next door neighbor at your New Year's Day open house, but don't buy this for yourself.

Dogged By It

His fine readers may have noticed that Sydney Brillo Duodenum has not posted anything since Father Time inserted his great cock another inch into the great big fuck-all of the universe. There has been much to say on, but SBD has nothing new to say about it. The last week has been a bit like what SBD's dog has been going through of late. Some nocturnal beast, probably a raccoon or a rabbit, or perhaps a family of squirrels, has taken up residence in the cavity below SBD's den. SBD took note of this one evening while crafting his review of the Sam Adams Imperial Hallertau, as just below his feet, under a mere inch and a half of carpet and padding and another three-quarters of an inch of plywood, a great ruckus of tearing and scratching could be heard. Examination of the crawl space through a basement window revealed an elaborate construction of pulled and propped insulation, although no clear sign of its inhabitant can yet be reported. Early this week, SBD Dog finally took note, perhaps after sufficient build-up of urine and feces molecules began to penetrate and embed the thin separation of civilization from the animal kingdom. Although beyond SBD's human senses at this point, helped immeasurably by the eternally burning Christmas Cookie flavored Yankee Candle, watched over by Mrs. SBD like some Roman priestess in the Temple of Diana, SBD Dog is acting as if a raccoon pup has been duct-taped to his nose. He is now a crazed coon hound, trying to tear up the carpet and pull this vicious rodent from its hive. The dog can't even sleep, he is so worked up over it. He is up every hour, demanding to be let out so he may investigate yet again the side of the house, or he goes under the deck to investigate the spot where a foundation vent has been pried lose by near simian paws to effect access. He returns constantly to the floor vent, which unfortunately is under the desk at the feet of anyone using the computer. This AM, he ripped the vent from its housing and attempted to stuff his snout into the vent itself. In 12 years, this behavior has never before been seen. He cannot get to it and it is simply driving him mad. As he is an old dog at this point, this may be the experience that finally sends him over the edge into canine madness, senility and rabidity. And that is SBD's situation - he simply can't find the words for current events and his own internal musings, no matter how much he pulls at the rug and scrapes at the plywood. SBD has a solution for his dog, as trappers are scheduled for early Monday, but there is no trapper of ideas for SBD. If SBD Dog were smaller, he'd be allowed under the crawl space to let his inner terrier find some relief. The best SBD can offer himself is an evening scourge of push ups, Scottish medicinals, crosswords, and, perhaps, some pr0n.

Resolved

Oh, of course, please do resolve to be happy and healthy and good and resourceful and a faithful husband and an honorable son and financially prudent and green and considerate and on time and to walk to work and floss and volunteer and be patient and to attend Mass every Sunday and to tell your kids you love them every day and to change the batteries in your smoke detectors every four months and to not talk during the movie and to buy Forever Stamps and put money in savings and to look for the beauty in family and friends and to clear out your e-mail inbox and use natural fertilizer on your lawn and to do any one of the other soul defibulations necessary to shock you into feeling good about yourself and getting people to like you.

As for Sydney Brill Duodenum, he resolves to be just as accurate, truthful, proud, brutal, condescending, harsh, obscure, disrespectful, doubtful, profligate, generous, dismissive, egotistical, pissed off and unfit as he was in 2008.