Mr. Obama's War: I Told You So

President Bush salutes in front of General David Petraeus
and Admiral William Fallon, September 2007, in Iraq

President Obama today announced an Iraq withdrawal plan that George Bush would be proud to call his own. Actually, it IS Bush's own.

Don't be fooled by the lawyerly language in his pledge to complete "the responsible removal of our combat brigades from Iraq" by August 2010. He's leaving up to 50,000 troops in place until the end of 2011, and I guarantee that they'll have weapons and the capability of responding with more than battalion strength. I'm not sure how he's defining "combat brigades," but he must be dancing close to an outright lie -- a brigade is only 3,000 to 5,000 soldiers, it looks to me like he's leaving three divisions in place.

Thank God.

Fully seven months ago, in July, I wrote the following:

If it's going to become Mr. Obama's war, I can take some comfort in the fact that at least he's showing signs of an ability to think independently of the extreme pacifist wing of his party.

Candidate Obama already was tacking to the right on the war -- his clarion call for surrender lost its usefulness as a wedge issue once Hillary Clinton withdrew from the race. The previously hapless George Bush had finally found the right general and the right strategy. Well before the election, even Obama had to acknowledge that the surge had "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams."

After winning in November, Obama co-opted Hillary and her one-time support for the war by naming her Secretary of State. But the clearest indication that the grown-ups would be in charge of the war came when Obama announced that he was retaining Bush's Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, who oversaw the turnaround in Iraq. I feel much better about the Obama Presidency now than I did on Election Day.

The Bush Administration won the war in Iraq just in time, making it too late for the Democrats to surrender. The real test will come with the war Obama says he wants to fight, in Afghanistan. I wish him every success.

(Photo: Associated Press)

My Kind of Dangerous Muslim Jihadi

Mad props to Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, better known as Dr. Fadl, for attacking al-Qaeda from the jihadi perspective. (Hat tip: Cliff May)

Half an hour ago I had not heard of Dr. Fadl, but apparently he is an al-Qaeda co-founder. Remember that when al-Qaeda was founded, its primary mission was not to terrorize America, but rather to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Dr. Fadl doesn't approve of the course Osama bin Laden has charted since 1988.

Dr. Fadl has a new book out, written from what apparently is his cushy cell in an Egyptian prison. Cliff May's column today is worth reading in its entirety, but here's my favorite passage, quoting Fadl:

“Every drop of blood that was shed or is being shed in Afghanistan and Iraq is the responsibility of bin Laden and Zawahiri and their followers,” he writes. “Was it not al-Qaeda that lit the fuse of sectarian civil war in Iraq, through
[the actions of al-Qaeda in Iraq commander] Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, who killed the Shi’ites en masse? . . . Can the mentality that caused the loss of an Islamic state that existed in reality, in the Taliban’s Afghanistan — can this mentality be expected to establish an Islamic state in Iraq — in reality, and not on the internet? And have the Islamic peoples become guinea pigs upon whom bin Laden and al-Zawahiri try out their pastime and sport of killing en masse?”

If America and the West are going to defeat Islamic fascism, one component of the struggle has to involve nurturing an alternate vision of Islam. That's why al-Qaeda threw everything it had into the war in Iraq -- a successful secular Islamic state is a much bigger threat to Islamic fascism than America itself could ever be.

Similarly, Dr. Fadl is arguably a more dangerous enemy for al-Qaeda than George Bush was. Fadl, a former leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, may not be a Boy Scout himself, but man, I'm liking him today.

Million, Billion, Trillion... Let's Settle on "Zillion"

I'm becoming a fan of Politico, which has intelligent writing on politics without any overwhelming left or right tilt. Today the site notes that all of the big numbers start to blur together:

Human beings have a hard time differentiating between millions and billions and trillions, let alone the numerical subsets thereof. To most of us, it just registers as “a whole lot.” ...

It is hard, then, to get people excited about the difference between $787 billion and $478 billion, both of which are equally abstract if not equally large sums — which is perhaps one reason why House Republicans’ alternate stimulus proposal, which carried the latter price tag, failed to gain much traction with the public.

As a public service, All That Is Necessary is pleased to present this statistical glossary, for use in explaining federal spending to your grandchildren: billion, trillion, quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion (which will lend itself to financial abstinence messages), septillion, octillion, nonillion, decillion.

(Custom word cloud graphic from wordle.net)

Murdoch Apologizes for Cartoon But Says it Was Not Meant to be Racist

I'm not a big Rupert fan, but I think he got it exactly right.

I've been involved in a lively debate over this at Conservative Black Woman's site, btw, if anyone is interested... check the comments.

Al "Thug" Sharpton Takes His Incendiary Show on the Road

Al Sharpton, and the logos of some of his extortion victims

It is POSSIBLE, of course, to construe the NY Post "chimp" cartoon as a racist slam at President Obama -- even though neither Obama nor his administration "wrote" the porkulus bill. That's why I said in my previous post that the cartoon was "stupid" -- in a city with a history of racial tension, the paper has no business comparing ANYBODY with a lower primate.

But to insist, in the face of the cartoonist's denials, and in the face of the actual factual basis for the cartoon, that the cartoon was aimed at Obama is to believe that a long-time cartoonist at one of the largest newspapers in the country is consciously trafficking in the most contemptible kind of racial imagery. It is, quite literally, unbelievable.

A responsible black leader would acknowledge the Post's apology and move on. In fact, a responsible black leader did exactly that. I would have preferred if Governor Paterson had explicitly criticized Sharpton, but his description of the Post apology as "very honorable" is a strong implicit slap at Sharpton. President Obama, who understandably had to cultivate Sharpton while establishing himself in politics, should repudiate Sharpton's comments as well. (Click photos for sources)

These thoughts all are sparked by a comment "ockraz" made about my prior post. He first heard about the cartoon via NPR, which offered no explanation OTHER THAN racism. As ockraz said,

People who heard Sharpton (or NPR) first will probably be more responsive to that interpretation. It's like holding up a Rorschach test and saying, "am I the only one who sees a bat?"

Exactly right.

It's not possible to completely unring the bell, and because of Sharpton's spin, some people will be saying for years that the Post called Obama a monkey. And that's why Sharpton's long history of racial demagoguery is so contemptible.

Whatever else he may be, Al Sharpton is not unaware of the effects his agitation can cause. He has used that knowledge to make a lucrative living for years, shaking down some of the largest and most well-lawyered corporations in America.

Sharpton HAS to understand that the cartoon was ill-advised rather than bigoted. He HAS to know that his incitements to riot can lead to riots. He HAS to know that he has blood on his hands from previous episodes of race-baiting.

I generally avoid expressing contempt for people on this blog, even if they are public figures. I've criticized President Obama's actions and policies and I proudly voted for John McCain, but I will not express contempt for my President -- and if he is not YOUR President, then you are not my countryman. The most derisive thing I've ever said about Obama as a person is to call him "The One" -- and Oprah did it first.

I make exceptions to the no-contempt policy for people with a long history of reprehensible behavior. Sharpton has qualified as a "thug" (no, it's NOT racial code) at least since 1987, when he was one of the architects of the Tawana Brawley hoax, and continued to endanger the life of Steven Pagones by branding him a racist, long after a grand jury refused to indict Pagones. Even Salon, a left-liberal bastion, has recognized that Pagones was "the Brawley case's true victim."

A black man has now been elected to the world's most powerful position, leaving Sharpton desperately trying to protect his race-baiting industry. Instead of moving on, Sharpton has ramped up his condemnation of the Post and has started to peddle it in new venues. Today he repeated his phony charges in Syracuse, as part of what a local TV station called "a drive to boost membership in a local chapter of his National Alliance Network."

As of yet there are no reports of rioting by the good citizens of Syracuse, so perhaps Sharpton is losing his mojo. One can only hope.

(Am I too hard on Sharpton here? If so, please comment to tell me how -- I promise I will not bite or bark at you. If it is possible to make a thoughtful defense of Sharpton, I would really like to see it. I would especially welcome comments, pro or con, from black readers.)

How NOT To Talk About Race

This week brings two reminders of the fact that it is possible to make statements that are both a) intellectually defensible, and b) really, really stupid.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether Americans focus too much on race, or not enough. Attorney General Eric Holder believes that to make progress in race relations, "we must feel comfortable enough with one another and tolerant enough of each other to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us."

OTOH, Jonah Goldberg argues today that:

Holder is wrong. America talks about race incessantly, in classrooms, lecture halls, movies, oped pages, books, magazines, talk shows, just about every third PBS documentary by my count, blogs, diversity training sessions and, yes, even mandatory Black History Month events.

I lean toward Goldberg's view, but Holder's belief that we need more frank conversations about race certainly is intellectually defensible. The really, really stupid part occurs, of course, when Holder says the lack of such discussions means that America is "a nation of cowards."

The statement is stupid because it undercuts the outcome Holder advocates. Now that one of the highest-ranking black people in America has said that Americans are cowards on racial issues, would you expect that I as an American and a white person would be a) more likely, or b) less likely to feel comfortable discussing racial issues with black people? (I suppose one could argue "more" on the evidence of this blog post, given that the blog has black readers, and that I would not likely be posting on racial issues today in the absence of Holder's speech. But the answer I'm looking for is "less.")

The other reason the statement is stupid is it undercuts Holder's own boss -- you know, America's first black president, who appointed the first black attorney general. The guy whose election vividly demonstrates how far America has come from the days of his early childhood, when Barack Obama would have been forbidden to use certain public drinking fountains. The guy who admirably seeks to position himself not as a black president, but as America's president.

This week's other example of intellectually defensible but really, really stupid statements comes from the New York Post, in the form of the cartoon below:

(If you're reading this from an RSS feed, the cartoon depicts a cop who has just shot a chimpanzee as saying, "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.")

This is intellectually defensible as a criticism of the stimulus bill, and as anyone who followed the debate knows, President Obama did not "write" the bill -- Congressional Democrats did. But in an environment where race-neutral terms like "socialist" and "inexperienced" have been described as racial code, it's really, really stupid to compare anybody to a lower primate.

Perhaps the worst thing about the Post cartoon is that it has temporarily interrupted Al Sharpton's descent into the obscurity he so richly deserves. Chris Muir sums it up more eloquently than I can in his cartoon today:


(Holder photo from Fox News)

The Beheading Victim Was Also Muslim

Nearly a week after her husband allegedly cut off her head, Aasiya Zubair Hassan still smiles confidently into the camera for the high-resolution publicity photo available on the website of the TV station the couple started.

If you download the photo, you'll discover that the filename is "Mo - Assiya - 3 - High.jpg". It's not clear whether "Assiya" is an alternative spelling that Aasiya would have accepted, or if it's just one last indignity at the hand of someone working for her estranged husband, Muzzammil Hassan. That's "Mo," on the right.

The caption on the Bridges TV website reads:

"Aasiya Zubair (left), wife of Bridges TV CEO Mo Hassan (right) played an instrumental role in the creation of Bridges TV since she came up with the idea for the network."

As Daniel Pipes, who has followed Bridges TV since its founding in 2004, notes:

Two sorts of public reactions to the murder are emerging: Spokesmen on behalf of Islamic organization emphasize that domestic violence happens in all communities and Muslims must pay it more attention, while women's rights advocates focus on the Islamic element.

• Mohamed Hagmagid Ali, vice-president of The Islamic Society of North America: "Domestic violence is a behavior that knows no boundaries of religion, race, ethnicity, or social status. Domestic violence occurs in every community. The Muslim community is not exempt from this issue. We, the Muslim community, need to take a strong stand against domestic violence. Unfortunately, some of us ignore such problems in our community, wanting to think that it does not occur among Muslims or we downgrade its seriousness."
• Marcia Pappas, New York State president of the National Organization for Women: "This was apparently a terroristic version of honor killing, a murder rooted in cultural notions about women's subordination to men. … Too many Muslim men are using their religious beliefs to justify violence against women."

I've been critical in the past about what I saw as insufficient Muslim condemnation of terrorism, but I have no quarrel with the ISNA statement above. The spokesman calls for Muslims to condemn domestic violence and not to pretend it doesn't happen in the Muslim community. I don't blame him for emphasizing, correctly, that men in other cultures also kill their wives.

I'm late to this story, but it's not going away soon. It's coming out now that this was his third marriage, and he was violent with his previous wives as well. Phyllis Chesler, who after the murder apparently accelerated publication of her study "Are Honor Killings Simply Domestic Violence?" (she votes No), has called on bloggers and reporters to help advance the narrative.

In 2004, Hassan said the station was started because

"There should be a Muslim media so that Muslim children growing up in America grow up with the self confidence and high self esteem about their identity both as Americans and as Muslims."

If "Mo" is in fact the killer, surely he must have known that the stereotypical manner of his crime would set that worthy cause back. At one time, Mo felt secure enough in his masculinity and his marriage and his culture to pose with his unveiled, lipsticked wife and credit her with the idea for the company he headed. It's hard to reconcile that with what he allegedly did last week.

Ready, Fire, Aim: Obama Signs "Stimulus" Bill

No worries -- Sasha and Malia's kids will pay for it

Michael Gerson describes the porkulus legislation signed by President Obama yesterday:

The bill was written in monopartisan secrecy, weighed down by irrelevant spending, considered in a rushed, uninformed debate and passed on a virtually party-line vote. The law contains provisions that seem to weaken welfare reform and invite trade disputes. And it adds a massive burden of debt to existing massive entitlement obligations requiring massive borrowing from international sources -- or, if such credit dries up, the massive printing of money to buy these bonds, leading to inflation.

Sounds like Gerson opposes the bill. Well, no:

But while the legislation was deeply flawed, there was little alternative to action. The usual recession remedy -- the lowering of interest rates by the Federal Reserve to loosen up credit and spending -- is of little use when the credit system itself is broken and rates are already near zero. The president and Congress were left with one option: attempting a fiscal jolt to counter the economic cycle. Such efforts in the past have often been mistimed, with the cavalry arriving just after the settlers have been massacred. But one has to try. In this case, necessity was the mother of excess.

For political reasons, I suppose it's true that "one has to try." But one does wish that one could be more confident about the outcome while saddling one's grandchildren with debt.

After weeks of invoking the Great Depression, Obama performed what Politico referred to as a "rhetorical pirouette" while signing the bill:

In his remarks, Obama projected an air of confidence. “We will leave the struggling economy behind us and come out more prosperous,” he vowed.

Well, one hopes he's right. But since Obama brought up the Depression, let's take a look at what has been learned from the historical record:

The recession that began in 2008 could turn out to be the worst slowdown since the Great Depression of the 1930’s. For three-quarters of a century, economists have been studying it diligently. And even now they cannot come to a definitive conclusion about the cause of that depression, the reasons for its severity and duration, or what cured it. In an introduction to a book of essays on the Great Depression he compiled in 2000, Ben S. Bernanke, then a Princeton professor and now chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, wrote, “Finding an explanation for the worldwide economic collapse of the 1930’s remains a fascinating intellectual challenge.”

Today, of course, the challenge is more than intellectual.

My wife has threatened to stop reading my blog because it's so depressing, so I've just spent 20 minutes staring at the screen, trying to think of a positive way to end this post. Here's the best I can muster: I still think comparisons with the Great Depression are overwrought. But even after that dark period, America did "leave the struggling economy behind us and come out more prosperous." I have no doubt we will do so again, eventually.

Sweetie, I'll let you know when I've changed the subject.

(Photo: AP, via Washington Times)

Britain Bows to Terrorism by Banning Geert Wilders

Basmallah, 3 1/2, shares what she has been taught about Jews,
in the short film Fitna

Last week, Great Britain shamefully denied entry to Geert Wilders, an elected member of the Dutch parliament, who had been invited to a screening of his film Fitna in front of the British House of Lords. It reportedly was the first time that Britain had denied entry to a duly elected legislator from a fellow European Union country.

Why did Britain take this drastic action?

The meeting of Mr. Wilders and members of the British Parliament had originally been planned for 29 January, but was postponed. Lord Nazir Ahmed, a Muslim member of the House of Lords (Labour), had threatened to mobilize 10,000 Muslims to prevent Mr. Wilders from entering the British Parliament. Lord Ahmed boasted in the Pakistani press that the cancellation of Mr. Wilders’ visit was “a victory for the Muslim community.”

More precisely, it was a victory for Islamic extremism, which once again successfully uses the threat of violence to push around a major Western power.

I highly recommend watching Fitna, which is available online in English translation -- although be warned that it contains gruesome images, many of which you have seen before. As described by National Review contributor (and former federal prosecutor) Andrew C. McCarthy:

Fitna runs about 15 minutes long. It depicts a phenomenon familiar to Britons who witnessed July 7 and Americans who lived through September 11: The faithful rendition of verses from the Koran, often recited by influential Islamic clerics, followed by acts of terrorism committed by Muslim militants who profess that they are simply putting those scriptures into action. To be sure, this is not the dominant interpretation among the world’s billion-plus Muslims, most of whom do not so much interpret their creed as ignore those parts that would otherwise trouble them. But to deny that Fitna reflects an intellectually consistent construction of Islam, adhered to by an energetic minority, is to deny reality.

Wilders leaves no doubt that he believes Islam itself is the problem, not just a small band of fanatics who have tried, as a recent president was known to say, to "hijack one of the world's great religions." Wilders ends the film with these words crawling up the screen:

For it is not up to me, but to Muslims themselves to tear out the hateful verses from the Quran.

Muslims want you to make way for Islam, but Islam does not make way for you.

The Government insists that you respect Islam, but Islam has no respect for you.

Islam wants to rule, submit, and seeks to destroy our western civilization.

In 1945, Nazism was defeated in Europe. In 1989, communism was defeated in Europe.

Now, the Islamic ideology has to be defeated.

Strong stuff, but as John O'Sullivan writes in the New York Post:

You may object that "Fitna" is one-sided or the Koranic quotations are wrenched from their context. If such criticisms have merit, surely the correct response is to debate with Wilders, not ban him.

Wilders is by no means above reproach, and he does the cause of free expression a disservice by calling for the Quran to be banned in the Netherlands. But his pending prosecution, under a hate-crimes law in the Netherlands that could send him to prison for up to two years, is an abomination in a nation that nominally values civil liberties.

Fitna is, in fact, filled with hate speech, and you'll have no trouble spotting it in the film. It comes from the pages of the Quran and from the mouths of the Muslim extremists. There is plenty of room to argue that Wilders' message is distasteful or overwrought, and Muslims and non-Muslims alike deserve every opportunity to make those arguments -- peacefully. By prosecuting Wilders and declaring him persona non grata, the Netherlands and Britain are proving once again what Western nations have been demonstrating for years: terrorism works.

Live, From Maplewood:Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

OK, enough with the financial crisis, the porkulus bill, the new president, Iraq... we're going local here.

Next weekend, Feb. 20-22, a talented troupe from my church, St. George's Episcopal in Maplewood, NJ, will stage Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, complete with live music.

My wife, the lovely and talented Web Goddess, and I are not in the production, but we've been involved in helping to publicize it. By "we" I mean mostly her. Here's the scale of our respective contributions -- she conceptualized, designed and executed the colorful banner you see here, combining a stock image rainbow swirl with a coat outline she drew herself, and tweaking the words endlessly to get them to fit.

Me? I looked over her shoulder when she asked me to, talked through some ideas and made encouraging sounds. At one point near the end, I said "maybe you could put a narrow white border around the coat," and then left her alone to figure out how to actually do it. If you look closely you can see the little white border, which really helps the coat pop out more from the rainbow background. That was my idea. I also sent a rehearsal photo, caption, and an ad to our local weekly. (The Web Goddess took the picture and designed the ad.)

Not that I'm proud of her or anything, but I actually think the poster my wife made is nicer than the official image from the London revival. It's certainly easier to read. And the white line is a nice touch.

Oh yeah, the production itself... it's gonna be great. There is some amazing musical talent in our parish, and a couple of the performers have done the show professionally. They've been preparing and rehearsing since October -- our church puts on a musical show every two or three years, and it's always fabulous. I strongly urge all of you to attend -- even the 13% of you who live outside the U.S. Details on tickets and show times are here, and you can see a two-minute rehearsal teaser on YouTube.

That's it from Maplewood -- regularly scheduled political grumpiness will resume soon.

Photo of the Web Goddess by Kirk Petersen (I borrowed her other camera).

"Stimulus" Bill Would Gut Welfare Reform

Buried deep in the so-called "stimulus" bill is an appalling sneak attack on one of the most important positive legacies of the previous Democratic president. As a National Review Online headline calls it, the provision amounts to "Ending Welfare Reform as We Knew It."

At the Heritage Foundation website, Robert E. Rector and Katherine Bradley explain:

Under the old AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) program, states were given more federal funds if their welfare caseloads were increased, and funds were cut whenever the state caseload fell. This structure created a strong incentive for states to swell the welfare rolls. Prior to reform, one child in seven was receiving AFDC benefits.

When welfare reform replaced the old AFDC system with TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), this perverse financial incentive to increase dependence was eliminated. Each state was given a flat funding level that did not vary whether the state increased or decreased its caseload. In addition, states were given the goal of reducing welfare dependence (or at least of requiring welfare recipients to prepare for employment).

The House and Senate stimulus bills will overturn the fiscal foundation of welfare reform and restore an AFDC-style funding system. For the first time since 1996, the federal government would begin paying states bonuses to increase their welfare caseloads. Indeed, the new welfare system created by the stimulus bills is actually worse than the old AFDC program because it rewards the states more heavily to increase their caseloads. Under the stimulus bills, the federal government will pay 80 percent of cost for each new family that a state enrolls in welfare; this matching rate is far higher than it was under AFDC.

It is clear that--in both the House and Senate stimulus bills--the original goal of helping families move to employment and self-sufficiency and off long-term dependence on government assistance has instead been replaced with the perverse incentive of adding more families to the welfare rolls. The House bill provides $4 billion per year to reward states to increase their TANF caseloads; the Senate bill follows the same policy but allocates less money.

On August 22, 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which imposed work requirements, provided job training and education, limited the length of time an individual could spend on welfare -- and perhaps most importantly, changed the funding mechanism to eliminate the "perverse incentives" described above. This fulfilled the vow Clinton made in his first inaugural speech, to "end welfare as we know it."

I've grown more conservative since the days when I voted for Clinton twice, but even during his presidency I admired him for his two most conservative accomplishments -- welfare reform and NAFTA. Now the first of those stands to be undone, and the "stimulus" bill also undermines the spirit of NAFTA, requiring that all iron and steel used for construction under the bill must be produced in America.

I'm not so penurious as to want to abolish welfare altogether. I just think it should be, as Clinton described it, a temporary "hand up," not a permanent "hand out." Welfare should not become a multigenerational way of life. I don't think there's anything unreasonable about requiring that any adult welfare recipient who is physically able to work should be working or training for work as a condition of participation.

Some have argued that welfare reform has hurt poor children and that the provisions should be liberalized. Fine; let's have that debate. But don't sneak the change into a provision buried 600 pages deep in a 1,600 page "stimulus" bill. There is nothing stimulating about giving the states a financial incentive to add more people to the welfare rolls.

Dr. Doom Is Still Prescribing, and Says Stimulus Is the Wrong Medicine

Remember Peter Schiff, who was subjected to ridicule for years for predicting that the housing prices and stocks were in a bubble that would eventually collapse? Well, I sure hope someone can convince me that he's wrong this time. (Hat tip: Conservative Command)

He's ratcheting up the dire rhetoric even more than President Obama is. But while I've been saying that the need for a stimulus is not so urgent that we can't take some care in how we spend the money, Schiff says the stimulus will actually make things worse. Much worse. An excerpt from the seven-minute video:

This thing [the financial crisis] is just getting started. Remember that what's imploding is the entire phony American economy, where Americans borrow money and spend it. What's happened right now is that the government is now taking on that mantle, the government is borrowing and spending, because Americans are too broke to do it, but what we're doing is making the problem worse.

And when the bubble finally bursts on the bond market... if the dollar rolls over, which it should, if it begins to fall, ultimately it's going to collapse, that's going to knock the rug out from everything the government is doing.

Because when the bond bubble bursts, now the government needs a bailout, the government is broke, and that's when this crisis is really going to go into a whole new gear.

I think the economy is pretty resilient, but I can't dismiss Dr. Doom's predictions out of hand. One blogger recently got a lot of attention by detailing numerous ways "Peter Schiff was wrong" about last year, and Schiff has responded in detail. I don't know which one to believe. Schiff may have been wrong about some specifics of the crisis, but he was correct in saying a crisis was building. Now everyone acknowledges that we're in a crisis, perhaps he's pushing his argument too hard. But in any event, it seems like one more reason to move cautiously on the stimulus.

Obama, Geithner Try to Calibrate Our Anxiety Level

Above all else, one thing was crystal clear after President Obama's prime-time news conference last night: The President doesn't read this blog. (What, you thought I was gonna talk about the economy?)

Despite my admonition yesterday to Stop Saying "Depression", Obama used the D word twice, once in his opening remarks and once in response to a question. I'm not the only skeptic -- the very first question he received challenged him about his apocalyptic language:

Thank you, Mr. President. Earlier today in Indiana, you said something striking. You said that this nation could end up in a crisis without action that we would be unable to reverse. Can you talk about what you know or what you're hearing that would lead you to say that our recession might be permanent, when others in our history have not? And do you think that you risk losing some credibility or even talking down the economy by using dire language like that?

No, no, no, no — I think that what I've said is what other economists have said across the political spectrum, which is that if you delay acting on an economy of this severity, then you potentially create a negative spiral that becomes much more difficult for us to get out of.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner took his turn at bat this morning, and he had a narrow line to walk. He's proposing to invest a lot more money in many of the same big banks that have already gotten a lot of capital from the taxpayers. In David Brooks's column in yesterday's New York Times, Geithner seemed positively soothing in comparison to his boss, saying there have been worse crises in the past:

“People are enormously uncertain about the depth of the recession," Geithner says. “They’re enormously uncertain” about how their assets will perform in this environment. But this is not like the savings-and-loan crisis of the ’80s and ’90s, or like Sweden, where banks themselves were dead, he said, adding that we’re trying to repair “a system that is largely alive and will largely survive but is still burdened by systemic market failure, systemic uncertainty.”

Today he triangulated a bit. I don't see a transcript yet, but in his prepared remarks, Geithner had this to say:

"This is a challenge more complex than any our financial system has ever faced, requiring new systems and persistent attention to solve. But the President, the Treasury and the entire Administration are committed to see it through because we know how directly the future of our economy depends on it."

Not the worst crisis ever, just the most complex. Given all the derivatives and exotic financial instruments that have been created in recent years, I tend to agree. (Geithner no doubt will be relieved to hear that.)

Two other things jumped out at me from Obama's news conference. The President said a couple of times that there were no earmarks in the Senate bill, which came as a surprise to me. The AP reports that he was relying on a narrow definition of the term "earmark." (Hat tip: Mark Hemingway.)

OBAMA: "I know that there are a lot of folks out there who've been saying, 'Oh, this is pork, and this is money that's going to be wasted,' and et cetera, et cetera. Understand, this bill does not have a single earmark in it, which is unprecedented for a bill of this size. ... There aren't individual pork projects that members of Congress are putting into this bill."

THE FACTS: There are no "earmarks," as they are usually defined, inserted by lawmakers in the bill. Still, some of the projects bear the prime characteristics of pork - tailored to benefit specific interests or to have thinly disguised links to local projects.

For example, the latest version contains $2 billion for a clean-coal power plant with specifications matching one in Mattoon, Ill., $10 million for urban canals, $2 billion for manufacturing advanced batteries for hybrid cars, and $255 million for a polar icebreaker and other "priority procurements" by the Coast Guard.

Obama told his Elkhart audience that Indiana will benefit from work on "roads like U.S. 31 here in Indiana that Hoosiers count on." He added: "And I know that a new overpass downtown would make a big difference for businesses and families right here in Elkhart."

Also, in a blogospheric brush with greatness, it turns out Jonah Goldberg and I had similar conversations with our wives during the news conference. Goldberg wrote today:

I griped about that "create or save" line to my wife over and over again last night. It's a new line, by the way (and it sounds like a prompt in a Microsoft word processing program). Until recently, Obama had said he wanted to create 3 million jobs (which is about the normal amount of jobs any recovery would generate, I believe). Now he says he wants to create or save 4 million jobs. Aside from the point that it will be hard to measure "saved jobs," why is he stopping there. Let's say there are 100 million jobs in America. Doesn't he want to save all — or nearly all — of them? Why not say his plan will create or save 100 million jobs?

Here's how anal I am: I looked it up. The latest Department of Labor jobs report indicates that there are more than 145 million jobs in the civilian labor force. Doubtless Obama will be able to claim having saved the vast majority of them. So I'm actually improving on Jonah's observation here, and I came up with it independently.

But enough about me, let's talk about you. Do you think I'm too self-absorbed?

(Photos: Getty Images, via CNN)

Slow Down on the Stimulus, and Stop Saying "Depression"

Not even close.

My nomination for understated headline of the year goes to today's Washington Post: "If Spending Is Swift, Oversight May Suffer."

Gee, ya think?

The $827 billion stimulus legislation under debate in Congress includes provisions aimed at ensuring oversight of the massive infusion of contracts, state grants and other measures. At the urging of the administration, those provisions call for transparency, bid competition, and new auditing resources and oversight boards.

But under the terms of the stimulus proposals, a depleted contracting workforce would be asked to spend more money more rapidly than ever before, while also improving competition and oversight. ...

"We don't have the means to make sure we don't blow through billions of dollars and give it to the wrong people," said Keith Ashdown, chief investigator at the nonpartisan Taxpayers for Common Sense. "We're on track to lose billions, if not tens of billions, to waste, fraud and abuse."

OK, you might say, but maybe that's the risk we have to take, if we really are faced with a "catastrophe," as the President has said. If this crisis is "as deep and dire as any since the days of the Great Depression," as Obama wrote in an op-ed last week, maybe throwing money at it now now now now now is the least-bad option we have.

Let's all take a breath. In the words of the headline over Cato Institute Senior Fellow Alan Reynolds column in today's New York Post: "It's a Recession, not a Catastrophe." As he documents in the table above, by many measures the recessions of 1981-82 and 1973-75 were considerably worse than what we are in now.

An average of 55 forecasters in the Jan. 15 Wall Street Journal survey expect real GDP to fall by another percentage point (a 2.1 percent drop in total) before recovering in the third quarter. If they're right, this would be just the third deepest postwar recession by that broad measure.

Measured by unemployment, on the other hand, this might well be the second deepest recession. The current unemployment rate of 7.6 percent is quite unlikely to reach the postwar record of 10.8 percent. But the Journal forecasters expect the jobless rate to top out at 8.9 percent after the recession is technically over - making this very close to becoming the second worst recession in terms of job loss.

In other words, there's really no excuse for Obama or anybody else using the term "Great Depression" in any discussion of the current economic situation. Unemployment in the Great Depression topped out at 25% in 1933 -- making it a completely different category of event. We're looking at unemployment that might get to be as bad as the early 70s. Meanwhile, the inflation of that era is a distant memory and mortgage rates are dramatically lower.

I favored the autumn bank rescue as a necessary evil -- the credit markets really were frozen, the economy really was in danger of freezing up, time really was of the essence. I don't see anything like the same urgency here. Remember also that in the bank rescue, the government wasn't spending hundreds of billions of dollars, it was investing. Risky investing, to be sure, but there's at least a theoretical chance that the taxpayers come out whole. But money spent wastefully is gone for good.

It's time to put on the brakes. Pare the stimulus bill way back, limiting the spending to projects that really will provide a short-term stimulus, and don't use the crisis to sneak through a decade's worth of pork. And President Obama, if you really want to demonstrate leadership this evening in your first prime-time news conference, take a cue from Alan Reynolds:

The president needs to be a calming voice right now, a source of strength. It's not helpful for him to be warning of a "catastrophe" and making vague, untenable allusions to the Great Depression. ... [R]ecovery will require more perspective and patience than we've been seeing from the White House lately, because time really does heal many economic wounds.

(Depression-era photo: The Market Oracle. Table: NY Post)

Global Warming and the Anthropogenic Financial Crisis

When listening to President Obama's dire predictions of "catastrophe" if a stimulus bill is not passed now now now now now, is anyone else reminded of the global warming debate?

Even most skeptics about what Taranto calls "global warmism" would concede that there are valid reasons to want to reduce the use of fossil fuels and the resultant greenhouse gases. The debate arises over what measures should be taken, and how urgently. (Now now now now now!)

Similarly, there seems to be widespread consensus that the economy is in terrible shape, and that an increase in economic activity would help. The debate arises over how best to stimulate the economy, and how urgently.

In both cases, proponents of "doing something" now now now now now maintain that there is no time to worry about the possible side effects. But I firmly believe that when everyone around you is clamoring for immediate dramatic action, that's exactly the right time to take a deep breath and think hard about the consequences. A few years from now the specifics of the stimulus package will be a lot more important than whether the bill was passed in February or March.

The one thing that seems clear to me is that if we are going to make a multi-hundred-billion-dollar effort to stimulate the economy, it should be done through a combination of a) tax cuts for lower-income people (pushing stimulus activity down to the individual level, among people who are likely to spend) and b) accelerating government spending that is destined to occur anyway.

That, of course, is not what the Democrats are planning. Here's Krauthammer, on the "fierce urgency of pork" behind the "legislative abomination" that is the stimulus bill (emphasis added):

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.

Krauthammer was writing about the House version of the bill, but I've seen little reason to believe that the Senate compromise reached last night is any better.

Meanwhile, Harvard economist and former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors Greg Mankiw describes "My Preferred Fiscal Stimulus":

I would institute an immediate and permanent reduction in the payroll tax, financed by a gradual, permanent, and substantial increase in the gasoline tax. I would make the two tax changes equal in present value, so while the package results in a short-run budget deficit, there is no long-term budget impact. Call it the create-jobs, save-the-environment, reduce-traffic-congestion, budget-neutral tax shift.

I recognize that some state governments are now struggling in light of the macroeconomic crisis. For the next two years, I would let each state governor have the authority to divert a portion of the payroll tax cut in his or her state and take the funds instead as state aid. This provision would essentially be giving governors the temporary authority to impose a payroll tax on his or her citizens, collected via the federal tax system. Those governors who think they have valuable infrastructure projects ready to go would take the money. When designing a fiscal stimulus, there is no compelling reason for one size fits all. Let each governor make a choice and answer to his or her state voters. It is called federalism.

Note that by allowing governors (and I think you'd have to include state legislators) to determine whether to substitute spending for tax cuts, Mankiw's proposal would mean that any decision about whether to build schools in Milwaukee would be made in Milwaukee, or at least in Wisconsin. And by gradually increasing the gasoline tax to offset the immediate payroll tax cut, the proposal would even... wait for it... help counteract global warming.

Iraqis Vote to Stabilize Their Country

Incomplete election returns from Iraq are very heartening. In addition to being almost completely peaceful -- with security provided solely by Iraqi forces, with Americans on standby -- the results appear to have strengthened the secular government of Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The various Sunni factions, which largely boycotted the 2005 elections, appear to have won representation proportionate to their numbers, giving them a stake in the government.

From an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (emphasis added):

The big loser in this election was Iran. Iranian agents spent a lot of money trying to influence the outcome of the elections in the south, and they largely failed. Iran's favored parties did poorly. The Iranians had hoped to persuade Iraqi voters to punish Mr. Maliki for signing the security agreement with the United States. Instead, these elections proved to be a powerful vote of confidence for the prime minister and his policies, including that agreement.

The big winner in this election was the concept of a unitary Iraq. An attempt to hold a referendum on establishing an autonomous Basra failed before the election. ISCI, the only Arab party that had favored the creation of an autonomous Shiite region, lost ground throughout that region, including in its own stronghold of Najaf. Iraqis have sent a clear message that they want to live in a single state with a strong central government connected to strong provincial governments, rather than in some sort of artificially federated state.

...

Iraq has gone from being an impending disaster to a golden opportunity. Helping Iraqi internal politics develop peacefully and across sectarian lines is a critical part of reintegrating Iraq into the Arab world, making the world's only Shiite-controlled Arab state acceptable to the Sunni regimes that surround it. That reintegration, in turn, offers tantalizing prospects for balancing Iran and stabilizing the heart of the Muslim world. The stakes in Iraq remain very high, but we are finally starting to see the return on our investment.

Thank you, President Bush. The only way to defeat Islamic fascism is to nurture and support peaceful alternatives in the Arab and Muslim worlds. Iraq is a good start.

(Photo: AP)

Honeymoon-Over Watch: Daschle and the Post-Racial Presidency

Tom Daschle withdrew as nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services yesterday, reportedly to enable him to audition for a better-paying movie gig as Harry Potter's dad.

The Washington Post reports (emphasis added):

Obama officials had sought a seamless transition, nominating most of his Cabinet at record pace and taking office ready to implement a raft of new policies. His reversal yesterday suggested that speed may have come at a cost, and that Obama, despite the overwhelming popularity he had upon taking office and the major challenges facing the nation, will not be spared from the same kind of scrutiny his predecessors have faced.

MoDo takes the gloves off:

It took Daschle’s resignation to shake the president out of his arrogant attitude that his charmed circle doesn’t have to abide by the lofty standards he lectured the rest of us about for two years.

Dana Milbank wrote, "If this is Obama's honeymoon, one shudders to think what a lovers' quarrel would look like. "

Going "meta" for a moment, the honeymoon may be over for the "Honeymoon-Over Watch." A Google search for Obama honeymoon returns 2,880,000 results, indicating that the metaphor may not be quite as fresh and insightful as I imagined when I turned it into a category on my blog.

I think the end of the honeymoon is a good thing -- and not because of any ill will toward Obama. I see it as a sign that Obama is making a transition from being the first African-American president to the much more essential and powerful role of being simply the American president.

For now, it may still be the case that only an Establishment liberal like Maureen Dowd can call Obama "arrogant" without prompting accusations that it's a code word for "uppity." We are just a few short months removed from the ludicrous notion that observations about Obama's "inexperience" constitute some sort of racial code. But as Obama adapts to a role where he can no longer vote "present," he will have additional opportunities to attract criticism from across the political spectrum. If people grow used to the idea that it's possible to criticize a black person without being a racist, our society will have made an important step toward racial equality.

(Photo: UPI)

In Iraq, the People Have Spoken -- Peacefully

What if they held an election and the terrorists stayed home? From MSNBC:

BAGHDAD - Iraqis held their most peaceful election since the fall of Saddam Hussein on Saturday, and voting for provincial councils ended without a single major attack reported anywhere in the country.

In the NBC Nightly News report of the elections, below, we see how women are beginning to play a more prominent role in Iraqi government and society.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Yesterday's election occurred 1 year, 9 months and 11 days after the Senate Majority Leader's shameful attempt to preemptively surrender:



Our new president also opposed the surge, of course, and he won his party's nomination in part because he alone among the major candidates opposed the war in Iraq from the start. I'm very grateful that he was not the commander in chief in 2007, when the new strategy was put in place. Now that it's Mr. Obama's war, I'm heartened by the fact that he kept in place the Defense Secretary who oversaw the change in strategy.

"I congratulate the people of Iraq on holding significant provincial elections today," Mr Obama said in a statement. "This important step forward should continue the process of Iraqis taking responsibility for their future." Thanks to President Bush, they have the opportunity to do so.

(Photo at top is from PUK Media, where there are dozens more photos from the voting.)