Cascajun

They are just putting their rules of community organization in action:

Evidence appears to be mounting that the Obama administration has systematically targeted for closing Chrysler dealers who contributed to Repubicans.

I think the reason Pakistan’s right to exist and bomb the living daylights out of its enemies are unchallenged is based on pure political considerations. Legality and morality have nothing to do with it. Pakistan and the Islamic world are now economically and electorally more valuable to the Western leaders than a handful of Jews on the shores of the Med. The rise of a growing Muslim voter base in the West has canceled the edge Jews once held in European and American politics. Oil and votes are hard combination to beat.

–Richard Fernandez

The sultans of swat.

Professor Randy Barnett, after publishing an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal titled The Case for a Federalism Amendment, has drafted such an amendment and is soliciting public comment.

The trend is your friend only until it ends.

The Trend May Not Be Your Friend

The Economist on Obama:

His performance has been weaker than those who endorsed his candidacy, including this newspaper, had hoped. Many of his strongest supporters—liberal columnists, prominent donors, Democratic Party stalwarts—have started to question him. As for those not so beholden, polls show that independent voters again prefer Republicans to Democrats, a startling reversal of fortune in just a few weeks. Mr. Obama’s once-celestial approval ratings are about where George Bush’s were at this stage in his awful presidency. Despite his resounding electoral victory, his solid majorities in both chambers of Congress and the obvious goodwill of the bulk of the electorate, Mr. Obama has seemed curiously feeble.

Jennifer Rubin at Commentary remarks, in a response titled Not Like We Didn’t See this Coming, that “the Right was correct about Obama: he’s an ultra-liberal at least on domestic policy, not a pragmatic centrist either on policy or in style.”

Don’t miss the colossal battle of the deficits: Chimpy-Bush McHitlerburton vs. Hopey Change Yes We Can!

SUNDAY ONLY!!

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Wretchard comments:

The CBO estimates that President Obama will incur $9.3 trillion dollars in deficits. What rational purpose does the expenditure of these vast sums hope to achieve? Or has the ‘rescue’ process somehow become like an ungoverned engine which is going to thrash itself to death?

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama’s budget would produce $9.3 trillion in deficits over the next decade, more than four times the deficits of Republican George W. Bush’s presidency, congressional auditors said Friday.

The new Congressional Budget Office figures offered a far more dire outlook for Obama’s budget than the new administration predicted just last month — a deficit $2.3 trillion worse. It’s a prospect even the president’s own budget director called unsustainable.

In his White House run, Obama assailed the economic policies of his predecessor, but the eye-popping deficit numbers threaten to swamp his ambitious agenda of overhauling health care, exploring new energy sources and enacting scores of domestic programs.

What’s really remarkable is that nobody, at least nobody in BHO’s inner circle, seems to think this is a potential problem; and they are busy posing for photo ops in front of vegetable patches on the White House lawn. I used to think the French aristocrats were crazy for playing shepherd in amateur skits or eating cake while things fell apart around them. Maybe its just human nature.

Anti-stimulus protests were held in cities around the country yesterday, including Seattle.

Schooner Cove, located on the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

I watched President Obama’s speech last night regarding the economic stimulus proposals now being considered by Congress. In the speech, President Obama asserted that the debate over Keynesian economic policy was settled long ago. In a nutshell, Keynesian theory is that government should spend massive amounts of money to reinvigorate a stagnent or declining economy; the veritable spend your way out of a recession. Obama then went further with his assertions, blaming the current crisis on the “failed policies” of George W. Bush and Republicans in Congress.

President Obama’s assertions only jeopardize the slim odds any meaningful legislation will come from Washington. Furthermore, his assertions are intellectually dishonest and will do nothing to move the debate forward.

James K. Glassman, the former Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, has an excellent piece in Commentary Magazine that addresses the debate over the merits of economic stimulus. In his piece, Glassman assserts that “we have learned almost nothing about the use of fiscal stimulus since the Great Depression, and it is a fatal conceit to assume that we can hurriedly construct a fiscal policy that will produce the prescribed results today.”

Quoting Friedrich von Hayek, Glassman notes the folly of economists and policy makers efforts to treat economics and it’s theory like physical sciences.

If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants.

Glassman concludes that stimulus in the form of “fiscal intervention with the express purpose of speeding up the normal regenerative process…is unnecessary and almost certainly harmful, a policy based on hubris and anxiety, rather than on history and good sense.” He suggests that “the proper way to analyze discrete proposals today for spending or taxing is on their own merits, not on their supposed ability to stimulate something else. There may, in fact, be a good reason for government to spend billions of dollars today on building highways, and it has nothing to do with stimulus. It is that long-term interest rates are at historic lows and that the right highways can boost the economy in the long term. There also may be a good reason, again far apart from stimulus, for revising the tax code and reforming Social Security and Medicare.”

Today’s plunge on the Wall Street, following Obama’s speech last night and Tim Geithner’s proposed plan to stabilize banks, suggests the debate over the merits of the proposed stimulus isn’t settled.

My hope is for an honest debate and a change from the intellectual dishonesty and finger pointing we continue to see in Washington.