MLK and BHO

On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King said this to a multitude of Americans in Washington, DC. He said:

I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

A little over a year ago, Barack Obama was elected to be President of the United States based upon the color of his skin. His performance as president will be judged by the content of his character.

We know that, for African Americans, the election of Barack Obama as president was indeed a dream that they thought could never happen. The open weeping in the streets that we witnessed on the night of his election is testimony enough to that.

But for our liberal friends, I soon discovered, Obama's election was another triumphant "first," America's First Black President.

I confess that I was taken aback by that. That's because, over the years, I've become jaded by the constant liberal yammering about First Black This and First Woman That. To me, the actual election of a black man or appointment of a woman is ephemeral. What matters is not the "first," but the principles, the culture that provides a level societal playing field upon which people can be judged upon the content of their character.

People can and will overcome light-to-moderate discrimination. It is the heavy-duty discrimination enshrined in law and backed by the full force of the state that breaks men's hearts. America no longer has frank, state-enforced discrimination. Not unless you include the "conservatives need not apply" signs at the nation's universities. Sooner or later, an African American would become president.

But now President Obama has to govern. Governing is not a question of skin color. It is a question of character. And it is no startling thing to say that his first year in office has been troubling on the character front for a number of reasons.

There was first of all the pivot to partisanship from a man that ran on healing the divisions. You could say that the election of a filibuster-proof Senate changed the game. But politicians have learned down the decades that they need to keep, more-or-less, to their promises.

• There was the failure to pivot from the campaign agenda to fixing the economy. In good times the American people, a generous people, are willing to spend money of the pet projects of earnest activists. We did quite a bit of that in the prosperous Nineties and Noughties. But when the economy is in the tank they expect their leaders to get with the program. It's a question of character.
  
• There is the cram-down on health care against the will of the American people. Let us rehearse just how extraordinary this is. Back in 1940 and 1941 President Roosevelt famously dithered about entering World War II. He understood that he didn't have the support of the American people. Not until that famous "day which will live in infamy." Back in 2005 President Bush wanted to reform Social Security, but he found that he could not persuade the American people to folow him. He wanted to reform immigration, and had a cram-down all ready, but he found that the American people would not follow him. So he and the leaders of Congress backed off. It's a question of character.
  
• There is the pivot on the war against terror. All through the campaign and through the first half of 2009 Obama was playing to the liberal gallery about Bush's war, about negotiations, apologizing for America's sins, and treating terrorists as criminals rather than enemy combatants. Now, after the deterioration in Afghanistan and the multiple terror attacks, he has changed his policy and is reverting towards the policy desired by the broad American people, but opposed by his liberal base. Only when confronted by the brute facts of reality has he changed his policy. It raises a question of character.

There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding in the liberal mind about the nature of government. Liberals believe that it is their destiny to create a new society based upon the liberal values of caring, compassion, and social justice. Maybe it is. But that is not a program for government. It is a religious vision of a world saved from sin.

Government is a mundane thing. It is informed by culture and religion, but it is still government. It is the sector of force, and force being an anti-social thing, it is better to limit its scope as much as possible. That is why the United States advertises in the Declaration of Independence that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed." It follows that any power of the government not derived from the consent of the governed is unjust.

The extraordinary thing about President Obama in his first year of government is the extent to which he is governing against the consent of the governed. It is not partisan or mean-spirited to say that this is shocking and unprecedented. That President Obama and his advisors do not seem to appreciate this is frightening. It raises a question of character in the president and those that advise him.

Obama's Tame Professor

So now we know how all the rosy predictions of bending the cost curve on health care got put together. The Obamis had a bribed apologist of a college professor feeding them the objective, unbiased truth. His name? Jonathan Gruber, MIT economist.

The Wall Street Journal edit page reports.

The press corps is agonizing, or claims to be agonizing, over the news of Jonathan Gruber's conflict of interest: The MIT economist has been among the foremost promoters of ObamaCare—even as he had nearly $400,000 in consulting contracts with the Administration that weren't disclosed in the many stories in which he was cited as an independent authority.

Why is this not surprising? It is just what we would expect the Obama administration to do.

The disclosure of the Gruber non-disclosure ties in with David Brooks's oped last week about the disconnect between the Tea Party movement and the educated class. This week Michael Barone weighed in on Brooks's theme. He discussed how the Tea Party people are right on the substance of the issues, and the educated class is wrong.

Gun control? More citizens with guns means less crime. Climate? Educated-class scientists have been cooking the books.

On these issues the educated class is faith-based and the ordinary Americans who increasingly reject their views are fact-based, just as the Obama enthusiasts are motivated by style and the tea partiers by substance.

Actually, I think that Michael Barone is being too kind to the educated class of Obama enthusiasts. He equates the educated class and the Tea Party movement as if they are equals. This, of course, is wrong.

The educated class is the power elite in America today. The Tea Party is a grass-roots movement with no power except its enthusiasm and its numbers. What the educated class believes in is its power. The Tea Party movement believes in limited government. It believes in limiting the power of the elite, educated or otherwise.

I know which side I am on.

Bank Crisis Inquiry: Where's Fannie?

Today our noble and self-sacrificing solons are grilling the eevil bonus-begotten bankers. The ones that nearly crashed the credit system in fall 2008 with their greed, according to the MSM narrative. Write Daniel Wagner and Jum Kuhnhenn of AP:

Four of Wall Street's most powerful leaders — Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chairman-CEO Lloyd Blankfein, JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO James Dimon, Morgan Stanley Chairman John Mack and Bank of American Corp. CEO-President Brian Moynihan — were to give sworn testimony before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which was holding its first session Wednesday.

Erm. Why aren't the CEOs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on that list, Senator? Last I heard the big banks on Wall Street had paid back their TARP loans. But not Fannie and Freddie. The US government has put $400 billion into Fannie and Freddie since the crash. You know things are really serious because the Treasury announcement about the $400 billion was made on Christmas Eve. Here's Bloomberg's Betty Liu and Matt Leising:

Taxpayer losses from supporting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will top $400 billion, according to Peter Wallison, a former general counsel at the Treasury who is now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

“The situation is they are losing gobs of money, up to $400 billion in mortgages,” Wallison said in a Bloomberg Television interview. The Treasury Department recognized last week that losses will be more than $400 billion when it raised its limit on federal support for the two government-sponsored enterprises, he said.

Hmm. Let's get the details.

The Treasury said on Dec. 24 it would provide an unlimited amount of assistance to the companies as needed for the next three years to alleviate market concern that the government lifeline for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the largest source of money for U.S. home loans, could lapse or be exhausted.

Let's get this straight. The bankers have paid back all the money and they are now making record profits. So the banks are no longer a problem.

Meanwhile Fannie and Freddie are bleeding billions and are still losing money. They are going to cost the taxpayers $400 billion at least, and very likely more.

So what does Congress do? It calls up the CEOs of the profitable banks so that it can hector them about their bonuses. They are the problem, apparently.

Can anyone say: Three Card Monte?

"It's the Peoples' Seat"

How much do you think that Scott Brown paid to have David Gergen ask that question about "the Kennedy seat" at the debate last night? Probably nothing.

But I imagine that Scott Brown was waiting for a question, any question with a thoughtless reference to the Kennedy seat, and he had the answer ready. Because if you are Scott Brown and his campaign staff running for the United States Senate seat held since 1962 (!) by the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) you are probably seething over the presumption that the seat is a Kennedy seat and that a Kennedy and a Democrat has a right to sit in it. For ever. So you have the response ready.

"With all due respect, it’s not the Kennedy seat and it’s not the Democrats’
seat, it’s the people’s seat."

Yeah. There's a lot of presumption among our liberal friends that they own certain things in American life. They own idealism. They own the "little people." They are the compassionate people. They are the evolved people. They are the intelligent people.

These are the beliefs of a governing elite already past its peak. They are the notions of an arrogant upper class already rotted by bad apples, a product already past its sell-by date.

So we ask the good voters of Massachusetts. Are you ready to send a message to Washington DC that you will not be patronized by the mainstream media and the political establishment? Are you willing to send a message to President Obama and Senator Reid on their desperately flawed health reform bill?

Tell you what, Bay Staters. You can always chuck Scott Brown out at the next election, and elect a host of Democrats and Kennedeys to every seat in the state.

But, this one time, why not send a message to Washington, and teach the politicians a lesson?

Arguing About Monetary Policy

What do you know? Economist John B. Taylor is in a spat with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke about monetary policy.

Taylor is the author of a rule that specifies the interest rate that the Fed ought to use to guide its monetary policy. According to the Taylor Rule, the Fed's policy was too loose in 2002-2005. Helicopter Ben gave a speech explaining, as Taylor writes in the Wall Street Journal, that things were OK after all:

In his speech, Mr. Bernanke's main response to this critique was to propose
alternatives to the standard Taylor rule—and then to use the alternatives to
rationalize the Fed's policy in 2002-2005.

Well maybe Ben has a point. Or maybe not. Id be a lot happier if the Fed chairman were a real banker, and the Fed were a completely private organization that didn't owe a dime to the government.

The fact is that ever since 1913 the Federal Reserve has been an obvious stooge of the US government. You can say that, in wartime, that's the right stance. But in peacetime the Fed spends far too much time pulling the politicians' chestnuts out of the fire. The result has been that the dollar has declined in a single century from $20.75 per ounce of gold to $1,100. It's worked out real good for the nation's biggest debtor, Uncle Fed, but not so good for widows and orphans.

The big problem with the Fed is that it is always trying to rush recovery from recessions, as right now. In doing so, no matter what the rules it tries to follow, it always delays too long the change from stimulative policy (printing money) to a restrictive policy.

What we need to do is take the Fed out of the policy mix for stimulating the economy. It should maintain the value of the dollar at a fixed gold price (or other price if it can find a better one) and stand by to rescue the credit system if it seizes up.

Of course, even if it did this one small thing, it still wouldn't solve the Fannie Freddie problem. But at least it's a start.

Educating Barry

I've said all along that we needed to elect a Democrat in 2008 because we needed to put the Democrats in charge of the war on terror.

As long as Bush and the evil Republicans were in charge, Democrats could say that Bush provoked the terrorists, that his cowboy diplomacy wrecked all efforts at peace, that the war in Iraq was the wrong war, that Bush was "stubborn," and so on.

That sort of thing is just politics. But it also arises honorably from the liberal belief system. Liberals adhere to a belief system that says that conflict arises out of social injustice and oppression. Remove the injustice and you remove the violence. That is the meaning of Reverend Al Sharpton's war cry: "No justice, no peace."

Liberals apply this doctrine to everything except their culture war with conservatives. But of course, that conflict is the fault of conservatives for being racists, sexists, and homophobes.

So the United States needs to educate its governing elite, liberals, to reality from time to time. Or as Smokoe Joe, the charcoal-burner in the boy's adventure story Brendon Chase said: We need to "larn 'em."

Just as President Carter entered office complaining of our "inordinate fear of communism," so President Obama entered office promising a "reset" of US foreign policy, an emphasis on "soft power" over crude neo-con "hard power."

The problem is that the American people expect its government to defend against enemies foreign and domestic. Whatever a Democratic president may enter office thinking, he finds sooner or later that reality and public opinion force him to fight communism or Islamic terrorism, or whatever the anti-American threat may be. So now President Obama has been forced to up the ante in Afghanistan and now, after the Christmas pantybomber, declare that:

"We are at war. We are at war against al Qaeda."

So that's all right. That has "larned" President Obama and taken care of our liberals friends on defense for the next generation.

Now we need to deal with our liberal friends on all the other things they know that aren't so.

I am thinking of health care, "affordable housing," education, regulation, environment, welfare, finance, monetary policy, public-private partnerships, excessive government pay, and so on.

Hey, we can't solve everything in one year.

Dems to Link GOP to Palin and Tea Party

Yes. You read it right. According to Patrik Jonsson the Democrats are planning to campaign against the GOP by linking candidates to Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement.

Democrats are aiming to vilify the rising Tea Party movement as woefully old-school and out of touch. “Labeling their GOP candidates as being part of the Sarah Palin or Tea Party wing of the GOP will be the key element” of Democratic attacks in 2010, writes John Fund in The Wall Street Journal.

Old school? Out of touch? Democrats are planning to say that a brand-new grass-roots populist movement is old and out of touch? What are they smoking? Sounds like it's the Democrats that are out of touch, calling plays out of a 30-year-old playbook.

Here's more:

“The Republican Party is trapped by their base, which is going increasingly conservative,” says Mr. Abramowitz [, political scientist from Emory University, Atlanta].

Actually, the Republican Party has to do some pretty fancy footwork to keep its base at home and also capitalize on the Tea Party movement. But you don't need me to tell you that.

The big problem for the Republican Tea Party is to turn around folks like Larry Elder's dentist. Larry took his 94-year-old dad to the dentist, and all of a sudden, the dentist wanted to talk politics.

"Sarah Palin, do you guys really like her?"

My dad's doctor asked me this a couple of weeks ago. His smile seemed to shout, "Are you guys crazy?" I had taken my 94-year-old Republican father to see him several times, but politics never came up.

Larry took the dentist through a long dialog in which he challenged all the Democratic talking points: that Palin's stupid, not prepared. And on through Joe Biden being on the wrong side of every issue for thirty years. And then to Bush actually being smarter than Al Gore and John Kerry according to their test scores.

Basically, the dentist was a Democrat and liked Democratic policy and politicians. Until it came to ObamaCare.

Dad's doctor suddenly turned into Mr. Hyde. He teed off on the government dictating how he should practice medicine. He predicted that costs would go up, not down. He predicted that quality would go down, not up. He talked about the importance of the profit incentive.

"Sarah Palin feels the same way you do."

Well, now. Do tell.