I just got a ticket to see him Saturday at the Royal George!

http://www.rickyjay.com/newyorker.htm

Obama did, as is his wont, devote some time last night to rehashing complaints about the previous administration, and he now stands accused of delivering false information. The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb has the statement from Donald Rumsfeld, who served as defense secretary from 2001 through 2006:


"In his speech to the nation last night, President Obama claimed that "Commanders in Afghanistan repeatedly asked for support to deal with the reemergence of the Taliban, but these reinforcements did not arrive." Such a bald misstatement, at least as it pertains to the period I served as Secretary of Defense, deserves a response.


I am not aware of a single request of that nature between 2001 and 2006. If any such requests occurred, "repeated" or not, the White House should promptly make them public. The President's assertion does a disservice to the truth and, in particular, to the thousands of men and women in uniform who have fought, served and sacrificed in Afghanistan.


In the interest of better understanding the President's announcement last night, I suggest that the Congress review the President's assertion in the forthcoming debate and determine exactly what requests were made, who made them, and where and why in the chain of command they were denied."

Something tells us that will not be rehashed. Those now in power in Washington are interested in rehashing the preceding administration only when they can use it to produce excuses for themselves.

The policy Obama adopted after months of ostentatious dithering is about as good as anyone could have expected, but the tone of his speech doesn't seem to have inspired anyone. Here's Tunku Varadarajan's review:


"What has struck me most about Obama's Afghan enterprise--and his speech did not cause me to alter my view--is how obvious it is that he doesn't really want to do it. He wants to do health care. Obama has tried every delaying trick in the book--waiting for three months after Gen. McChrystal's request for more troops, having meeting after meeting after meeting, sending Gen. Jones to tell McChrystal not to ask for more troops, having his economic team say it will cost too much, framing the venture in terms of "exit strategies" rather than victory, etc. His ambivalence was on naked display [last night]. Can you imagine Churchill delivering a speech like this, one so full of a sense of the limitation of national possibilities? No wonder Hillary [Clinton]--when the camera panned to her--looked like she needed a drink. No wonder the cadets all looked so depressed. Would you want Eeyore for commander in chief?"

It sounds as though, after months of indecision, the president has finally resolved to be irresolute. It seems that his central strategic goal is to displease no one. Unless the speech turns out to be markedly different from what the Times leads us to expect--and let us hope it does--it will only reinforce the impression that he is a ditherer.


Last week Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post tried to rebut this stereotype. Here's how his story began:

President George W. Bush once boasted, "I'm not a textbook player, I'm a gut player." The new tenant of the Oval Office takes a strikingly different approach. President Obama is almost defiantly deliberative, methodical and measured, even when critics accuse him of dithering. When describing his executive style, he goes into Spock mode, saying, "You've got to make decisions based on information and not emotions."

Obama's handling of the Afghanistan conundrum has been a spectacle of deliberation unlike anything seen in the White House in recent memory. The strategic review began in September. Again and again, the war council convened in the Situation Room. The president mulled an array of unappealing options. Next week, finally, he will tell the American public the outcome of all this strategizing.

"He's establishing his decision-making process as being almost diametrically the opposite of the previous administration," says Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's chief of staff. Wilkerson, who teaches national security decision-making at George Washington University, says the Bush-Cheney style was "cowboy-like, typical Texas, typical Wyoming, and extremely secretive."

This story appeared on page A1. That is, at the Washington Post, it is still front-page news that "the new tenant of the Oval Office," who has been there for nearly a quarter of a term," is different from his predecessor. But actually, there's a lesson here, for journalists and politicians alike. With Achenbach's comments about Bush in mind, read this excerpt from the former president's Jan. 10, 2007, speech announcing the surge in Iraq:

It is clear that we need to change our strategy in Iraq. So my national security team, military commanders and diplomats conducted a comprehensive review.

We consulted members of Congress from both parties, allies abroad, and distinguished outside experts.

We benefited from the thoughtful recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan panel led by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Congressman Lee Hamilton. In our discussions, we all agreed that there is no magic formula for success in Iraq. And one message came through loud and clear: Failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the United States.

It was a spectacle of deliberation unlike anything seen in the White House in recent memory. Or it would have been, if anyone remembered it. But no one does, because the stereotype of Bush as "cowboy-like" stuck. The stereotype of Obama as indecisive, detached and irresolute is sticking, too. Achenbach has made a manful effort to counter it, but let's look at another passage from his piece and see how well he did:

Stephen Wayne, who teaches about the presidency at Georgetown, said: "He's not an instinctive decision-maker as Bush was. He doesn't go with his gut, he thinks with his head, which I think is desirable." Referring to the Afghanistan decision, Wayne said, "I don't think he is an indecisive person, I just think this is a tough one."

The defense of Obama is that he's not indecisive, he just has trouble making tough decisions. When decisions are easy, bang, he makes them just like that! Imagine him sitting in a diner:

Waiter: Would you like eggs for breakfast?

Obama: Yes, I most certainly would!

Accountability Journalism An Associated Press dispatch, written by Erica Werner and Richard Alonso-Zaldivar, compares the House and Senate ObamaCare bills. We'd like to compare this dispatch to the AP's dispatch earlier this week "fact checking" Sarah Palin's new book. Here goes:

Number of AP reporters assigned to story:
• ObamaCare bills: 2
• Palin book: 11

Number of pages in document being covered:
• ObamaCare bills: 4,064
• Palin book: 432

Number of pages per AP reporter:
• ObamaCare bill: 2,032
• Palin book: 39.3

On a per-page basis, that is, the AP devoted 52 times as much manpower to the memoir of a former Republican officeholder as to a piece of legislation that will cost trillions of dollars and an untold number of lives. That's what they call accountability journalism.

Is America at war, or not?
Posted: November 16, 20096:50 pm Eastern© 2009

Are we at war – or not?
For if we are at war, why is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed headed for trial in federal court in the Southern District of New York? Why is he entitled to a presumption of innocence and all of the constitutional protections of a U.S. citizen?
Is it possible we have done an injustice to this man by keeping him locked up all these years without trial? For that is what this trial implies – that he may not be guilty.
And if we must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that KSM was complicit in mass murder, by what right do we send Predators and Special Forces to kill his al-Qaida comrades wherever we find them? For none of them has been granted a fair trial.
When the Justice Department sets up a task force to wage war on a crime organization like the Mafia or MS-13, no U.S. official has a right to shoot Mafia or gang members on sight. No one has a right to bomb their homes. No one has a right to regard the possible death of their wives and children in an attack as acceptable collateral damage.
Yet that is what we do to al-Qaida, to which KSM belongs.
We conduct those strikes in good conscience because we believe we are at war. But if we are at war, what is KSM doing in a U.S. court?
Minoru Genda, who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor, a naval base on U.S. soil, when America was at peace, and killed nearly as many Americans as the Sept. 11 hijackers, was not brought here for trial. He was an enemy combatant under the Geneva Conventions and treated as such.
When Maj. Andre, the British spy and collaborator of Benedict Arnold, was captured, he got a military tribunal, after which he was hanged. When Gen. Andrew Jackson captured two British subjects in Spanish Florida aiding renegade Indians, Jackson had both tried and hanged on the spot.
Enemy soldiers who commit atrocities are not sent to the United States for trial. Under the Geneva Conventions, soldiers who commit atrocities are shot when caught.
When and where did Khalid Sheikh Mohammed acquire his right to a trial by a jury of his peers in a U.S. court?
When John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln, alleged collaborators like Mary Surratt were tried before a military tribunal and hanged at Fort McNair. When eight German saboteurs were caught in 1942 after being put ashore by U-boat, they were tried in secret before a military commission and executed, with the approval of the Supreme Court. What makes KSM special?
Is the Obama administration aware of what it is risking by not turning KSM over to a military tribunal in Guantanamo?
How does Justice handle a defense demand for a change of venue, far from lower Manhattan, where the jury pool was most deeply traumatized by Sept. 11? Would not KSM and his co-defendants, if a change of venue is denied, have a powerful argument for overturning any conviction on appeal?
Were not KSM's Miranda rights impinged when he was not only not told he could have a lawyer on capture, but told that his family would be killed and he would be waterboarded if he refused to talk?
And if all the evidence against the five defendants comes from other than their own testimony under duress, do not their lawyers have a right to know when, where, how and from whom Justice got the evidence to prosecute them? Does KSM have the right to confront all witnesses against him, even if they are al-Qaida turncoats or U.S. spies still transmitting information to U.S. intelligence?
There have been reports that in the trials of those convicted in the first World Trade Center bombing, sources and methods were compromised, weakening our security for the second attack on Sept. 11.
If the trial is held in lower Manhattan, how much security will be needed to protect against a car bomber who wants the world to see a mighty blow struck against the Great Satan? And if, as some suggest, the trial should be held on Governors Island, would that not make the United States look like a nation under siege?
What do we do if the case against KSM is thrown out because the government refuses to reveal sources or methods, or if he gets a hung jury, or is acquitted, or has his conviction overturned?
In America, trials often become games, where the prosecution, though it has truth on its side, loses because it inadvertently breaks one of the rules.
The Obamaites had best pray that does not happen, for they may be betting his presidency on the outcome of the game about to begin.

Pat Buchanan was twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the Reform Party's candidate in 2000. He is also a founder and editor of The American Conservative. Now a political analyst for MSNBC and a syndicated columnist, he served three presidents in the White House, was a founding panelist of three national TV shows, and is the author of seven books.



(Also: BHO guaranteeing convictions proves these are SHOW TRIALS only, so we can impress Euros I guess ... - TP)

Two Presidents in One! • "Mr. Obama used the forum at Shanghai's Museum of Science and Technology to make a plea for a free flow of information, saying it makes societies stronger and holds political leaders accountable. People in positions of power may bristle at criticism, he said, but open criticism 'makes our democracy stronger, and it makes me a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don't want to hear.' "--The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 16

• "Speaking privately at the White House on Monday with a group of mostly liberal columnists and commentators, including Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann of MSNBC and Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich and Bob Herbert of The New York Times, Mr. Obama himself gave vent to sentiments about [Fox News Channel], according to people briefed on the conversation."--New York Times, Oct. 23

Two Papers in One! • "The argument against unions--that they unduly burden employers with unreasonable demands--is one that corporate America makes in good times and bad. . . . The real issue is whether enhanced unionizing would worsen the recession, and there is no evidence that it would. There is a strong argument that the slack labor market of a recession actually makes unions all the more important."--editorial, New York Times, Dec. 29, 2008 •

"The New York Times News Service will lay off at least 25 editorial employees next year and will move the editing of the service to a Florida newspaper owned by The New York Times Company. . .The plan for the news service calls for The Gainesville Sun, whose newsroom is not unionized and has lower salaries, to take over editing and page design."--news story, New York Times, Nov. 13, 2009

Oh No, an Intrusion!
The New York Times is troubled by only one aspect of the monstrous ObamaCare bill:

When the House narrowly passed the health care reform bill on Saturday night, it came with a steep price for women's reproductive rights. Under pressure from anti-abortion Democrats and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, lawmakers added language that would prevent millions of Americans from buying insurance that covers abortions--even if they use their own money.
The restrictions would fall on women eligible to buy coverage on new health insurance exchanges. They are a sharp departure from current practice, an infringement of a woman's right to get a legal medical procedure and an unjustified intrusion by Congress into decisions best made by patients and doctors.

"An unjustified intrusion into decisions best made by patients and doctors" is an apt description of the entire ObamaCare effort.

Here's another straw in the wind, from London's Daily Telegraph:

Hasan worshipped at a mosque led by a radical imam said to be a "spiritual adviser" to three of the hijackers who attacked America on Sept 11, 2001.
Hasan, the sole suspect in the massacre of 13 fellow US soldiers in Texas, attended the controversial Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Great Falls, Virginia, in 2001 at the same time as two of the September 11 terrorists, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt. . . .
The preacher at the time was Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Yemeni scholar who was banned from addressing a meeting in London by video link in August because he is accused of supporting attacks on British troops and backing terrorist organisations.
Hasan's eyes "lit up" when he mentioned his deep respect for al-Awlaki's teachings, according to a fellow Muslim officer at the Fort Hood base in Texas, the scene of Thursday's horrific shooting spree.

The Middle East Media Research Institute last month excerpted a blog post from al-Awlaki's Web site in which he cheerleads for America's enemies:

America failed to defeat the mujahedeen when it gave its president unlimited support, how can it win with Obama who is on a short leash? If America failed to win when it was at its pinnacle of economic strength, how can it win today with a recession--if not a depression--at hand?
The simple answer is: America cannot and will not win. The tables have turned and there is no rolling back of the worldwide Jihad movement.

Today al-Awlaki has a post titled "Nidal Hassan Did the Right Thing":

Nidal Hassan is a hero. He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people. This is a contradiction that many Muslims brush aside and just pretend that it doesn't exist. Any decent Muslim cannot live, understanding properly his duties towards his Creator and his fellow Muslims, and yet serve as a US soldier. The US is leading the war against terrorism which in reality is a war against Islam.

Fall of the Wall

On Eve of Fall of Berlin Wall, Recalling the Liberal Media’s Take on Communism
By Rich Noyes (Bio | Archive)
November 5, 2009 - 10:48 ET

As readers of Cal Thomas’s
As readers of Cal Thomas’s latest syndicated column already know, the Media Research Center is releasing a new report today on the media’s coverage of communism, timed to coincide with the 20 anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Monday. Sad to say, but before, during and after those momentous events two decades ago, many in the liberal media continuously whitewashed the true nature of communism, or suggested free-market capitalism was somehow worse.

For our report, Better Off Red?, Scott Whitlock and I combed through the MRC’s archives; the quotes (and 19 audio/video clips) we pulled together show some liberal journalists utterly failed to accurately depict communism as one of the worst evils of the 20th century, and often aimed their fire at those who were fighting communism rather than those who were perpetuating it. The full report has more than 70 quotes; here's a sample from the Executive Summary:

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/rich-noyes/2009/11/05/eve-fall-berlin-wall-recalling-liberal-media-s-take-communism

The Worst Bill Ever
Epic new spending and taxes, pricier insurance, rationed care, dishonest accounting: The Pelosi health bill has it all.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has reportedly told fellow Democrats that she's prepared to lose seats in 2010 if that's what it takes to pass ObamaCare, and little wonder. The health bill she unwrapped last Thursday, which President Obama hailed as a "critical milestone," may well be the worst piece of post-New Deal legislation ever introduced.
In a rational political world, this 1,990-page runaway train would have been derailed months ago. With spending and debt already at record peacetime levels, the bill creates a new and probably unrepealable middle-class entitlement that is designed to expand over time. Taxes will need to rise precipitously, even as ObamaCare so dramatically expands government control of health care that eventually all medicine will be rationed via politics.
Yet at this point, Democrats have dumped any pretense of genuine bipartisan "reform" and moved into the realm of pure power politics as they race against the unpopularity of their own agenda. The goal is to ram through whatever income-redistribution scheme they can claim to be "universal coverage." The result will be destructive on every level—for the health-care system, for the country's fiscal condition, and ultimately for American freedom and prosperity.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

•The spending surge. The Congressional Budget Office figures the House program will cost $1.055 trillion over a decade, which while far above the $829 billion net cost that Mrs. Pelosi fed to credulous reporters is still a low-ball estimate. Most of the money goes into government-run "exchanges" where people earning between 150% and 400% of the poverty level—that is, up to about $96,000 for a family of four in 2016—could buy coverage at heavily subsidized rates, tied to income. The government would pay for 93% of insurance costs for a family making $42,000, 72% for another making $78,000, and so forth.
At least at first, these benefits would be offered only to those whose employers don't provide insurance or work for small businesses with 100 or fewer workers. The taxpayer costs would be far higher if not for this "firewall"—which is sure to cave in when people see the deal their neighbors are getting on "free" health care. Mrs. Pelosi knows this, like everyone else in Washington.
Even so, the House disguises hundreds of billions of dollars in additional costs with budget gimmicks. It "pays for" about six years of program with a decade of revenue, with the heaviest costs concentrated in the second five years. The House also pretends Medicare payments to doctors will be cut by 21.5% next year and deeper after that, "saving" about $250 billion. ObamaCare will be lucky to cost under $2 trillion over 10 years; it will grow more after that.
• Expanding Medicaid, gutting private Medicare. All this is particularly reckless given the unfunded liabilities of Medicare—now north of $37 trillion over 75 years. Mrs. Pelosi wants to steal $426 billion from future Medicare spending to "pay for" universal coverage. While Medicare's price controls on doctors and hospitals are certain to be tightened, the only cut that is a sure thing in practice is gutting Medicare Advantage to the tune of $170 billion. Democrats loathe this program because it gives one of out five seniors private insurance options.
As for Medicaid, the House will expand eligibility to everyone below 150% of the poverty level, meaning that some 15 million new people will be added to the rolls as private insurance gets crowded out at a cost of $425 billion. A decade from now more than a quarter of the population will be on a program originally intended for poor women, children and the disabled.
Even though the House will assume 91% of the "matching rate" for this joint state-federal program—up from today's 57%—governors would still be forced to take on $34 billion in new burdens when budgets from Albany to Sacramento are in fiscal collapse. Washington's budget will collapse too, if anything like the House bill passes.
• European levels of taxation. All told, the House favors $572 billion in new taxes, mostly by imposing a 5.4-percentage-point "surcharge" on joint filers earning over $1 million, $500,000 for singles. This tax will raise the top marginal rate to 45% in 2011 from 39.6% when the Bush tax cuts expire—not counting state income taxes and the phase-out of certain deductions and exemptions. The burden will mostly fall on the small businesses that have organized as Subchapter S or limited liability corporations, since the truly wealthy won't have any difficulty sheltering their incomes.
This surtax could hit ever more earners because, like the alternative minimum tax, it isn't indexed for inflation. Yet it still won't be nearly enough. Even if Congress had confiscated 100% of the taxable income of people earning over $500,000 in the boom year of 2006, it would have only raised $1.3 trillion. When Democrats end up soaking the middle class, perhaps via the European-style value-added tax that Mrs. Pelosi has endorsed, they'll claim the deficits that they created made them do it.
Under another new tax, businesses would have to surrender 8% of their payroll to government if they don't offer insurance or pay at least 72.5% of their workers' premiums, which eat into wages. Such "play or pay" taxes always become "pay or pay" and will rise over time, with severe consequences for hiring, job creation and ultimately growth. While the U.S. already has one of the highest corporate income tax rates in the world, Democrats are on the way to creating a high structural unemployment rate, much as Europe has done by expanding its welfare states.
Meanwhile, a tax equal to 2.5% of adjusted gross income will also be imposed on some 18 million people who CBO expects still won't buy insurance in 2019. Democrats could make this penalty even higher, but that is politically unacceptable, or they could make the subsidies even higher, but that would expose the (already ludicrous) illusion that ObamaCare will reduce the deficit.
• The insurance takeover. A new "health choices commissioner" will decide what counts as "essential benefits," which all insurers will have to offer as first-dollar coverage. Private insurers will also be told how much they are allowed to charge even as they will have to offer coverage at virtually the same price to anyone who applies, regardless of health status or medical history.
The cost of insurance, naturally, will skyrocket. The insurer WellPoint estimates based on its own market data that some premiums in the individual market will triple under these new burdens. The same is likely to prove true for the employer-sponsored plans that provide private coverage to about 177 million people today. Over time, the new mandates will apply to all contracts, including for the large businesses currently given a safe harbor from bureaucratic tampering under a 1974 law called Erisa.
The political incentive will always be for government to expand benefits and reduce cost-sharing, trampling any chance of giving individuals financial incentives to economize on care. Essentially, all insurers will become government contractors, in the business of fulfilling political demands: There will be no such thing as "private" health insurance.
***
All of this is intentional, even if it isn't explicitly acknowledged. The overriding liberal ambition is to finish the work began decades ago as the Great Society of converting health care into a government responsibility. Mr. Obama's own Medicare actuaries estimate that the federal share of U.S. health dollars will quickly climb beyond 60% from 46% today. One reason Mrs. Pelosi has fought so ferociously against her own Blue Dog colleagues to include at least a scaled-back "public option" entitlement program is so that the architecture is in place for future Congresses to expand this share even further.
As Congress's balance sheet drowns in trillions of dollars in new obligations, the political system will have no choice but to start making cost-minded decisions about which treatments patients are allowed to receive. Democrats can't regulate their way out of the reality that we live in a world of finite resources and infinite wants. Once health care is nationalized, or mostly nationalized, medical rationing is inevitable—especially for the innovative high-cost technologies and drugs that are the future of medicine.
Mr. Obama rode into office on a wave of "change," but we doubt most voters realized that the change Democrats had in mind was making health care even more expensive and rigid than the status quo. Critics will say we are exaggerating, but we believe it is no stretch to say that Mrs. Pelosi's handiwork ranks with the Smoot-Hawley tariff and FDR's National Industrial Recovery Act as among the worst bills Congress has ever seriously contemplated.

Andrew Jackson was provoked into a duel by a man who insulted his wife's honor. Charles Dickinson, the man who levied the insult, was known as a crack pistol shot, and many of Jackson's associates thought Dickinson had been paid to goad Jackson into a duel by political rivals. As the challenged, Dickinson shot first. Jackson reportedly did not stagger; did not waver; did not move an inch. Dickinson cried out in disbelief that he must have missed altogether. Not quite: He intended to kill Jackson and shot with sufficient accuracy to shatter Jackson's ribs and punctured a lung. With fiery resolve, Jackson cocked his pistol and shot Dickinson in the chest. Jackson's opponent collapsed, and would die of the wound later that night. Jackson said that if he'd been able to, he would have moved to Dickinson's bleeding form and struck it. Jackson's collapsed lung never healed correctly, leaving him with a life of persistent tremors and bloody, hacking coughs. The bullet was lodged close enough to his heart that doctors could not safely remove it, and it remained in his chest for the rest of his life. He suffered these symptoms in silence, never speaking about them or regretting them, but believed that they were just part of preserving his wife's honor.
Later, Jackson would, while in pursuit of a band of fleeing Indians, conquer the whole of Spanish Florida. This was bad news for then-President Monroe, who was in negotiations with the Spanish to buy Florida. Although Spain called for severe punishment, Jackson was never reprimanded, and Spain signed a treaty with America cedeing the Territory without any payment at all. President Monroe gave tacit reward to Jackson by naming him the governor of the territory.While president, Jackson was the target of a gun-wielding assassin. The guns both misfired, prompting the sixty-seven year old Jackson to beat his erstwhile assassin with a cane.

War - Huh! Good God Ya'll...

http://www.smallwars.quantico.usmc.mil/sw_past.asp
http://www.smallwars.quantico.usmc.mil/sw_today.asp

North America
1. U.S. vs. State and Non-State Terrorists - Global War on Terror (2001 to Present)
2. U.S. vs. Global Production and Distribution of Narcotics - War on Drugs (1971 to Prsent)
3. Mexico vs. Zapatista/Chiapas Rebels (1994 to Present)
4. Haitian Anarchy - Civil War (2003 to Present)
South America
1. Colombia vs. FARC and Narco-paramilitaries (1964 to Present)
2. US and Colombia - PLAN COLOMBIA (2000 to Present)
3. Peru vs. Shining Path and MRTA (1980 to Present - suspended since 2000)
Europe
1. Spain vs. Basque Separatists - ETA (1958 to Prsent)
2. Moldova vs. Trans - Dniester (1991 to Present)
Middle East
1. Israel vs. Palestinians (1947 to Present)
2. Israel vs. Syria Border Clashes (1967 to Present)
3. Israel vs. Iran and Non-State Terrorists (1979 to Present)
4. Turkey vs. Kurdish Rebels (1984 to Present)
5. Iraqi Sunni vs. Iraqi Shi’ites (1991 to Present)
6. Afghanistan vs. Taliban Holdouts and Tribal Warlords (2001 to Present)Asia
1. India vs. Pakistan – Kashmir Border Conflict (1948 – Present)
2. India vs. Pakistan (Kashmir – 1948 to Present)
3. Myanmar Civil War (1948 to Present)
4. Pakistan vs. Baluchistan Separatists and Rebel (1948 – Present)
5. Peoples Republic of China vs. Taiwan (1949-Present)
6. North Korea vs. South Korea (1953 – Present)
7. People’s Republic of China vs. Tibet (1959 to Present)
8. India vs. Naxalite Guerrillas (1967 to Present)
9. Indonesia vs. Irian Jaya and Aceh (1969 to Present)
10. Philippines vs. MNLF and NPA (1969 to Present)
11. Laos vs. Hmong Insurgency (1975 to Present)
12. Bangladesh Civil War (1975 to Present)
13. Sri Lanka vs. Tamil Eelam (1978 to Present)
14. India vs. Assam Rebellion (1980 to Present)
15. India vs. Punjab (1982 to Present)16. Myanmar Narco-guerrillas vs. U.S. (1988 to Present)
17. India vs. Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (1989 to Present)
18. Papua New Guinea vs. Bougainville (1989 to Present)
19. Republic of Georgia vs. Abkhasia and South Ossetia (1992 to Present)20. Tajikistan vs. Popular Democratic Front (1992 to Present)
21. Russia vs. Chechen Separatists (1994 to Present)
22. People’s Republic of China vs. Uighur or Xianjiang (1996 to Present)
23. Nepal vs. Communist Party of Nepal Maoist or CPNM (1996 to Present)24. Singapore and Malaysia vs. Piracy in Straits of Malacca (2000 to Present)
25. Thailand vs. Muslim Separatists (2003 – Present)
Africa
1. Chad vs. Muslim Separatists (1965 to Present)
2. Ethiopia vs. Oromo Liberation Front (1973 to Present)
3. Angola vs. UNITA (1975 to Present – currently suspended)
4. Somalia Civil War and Anarchy (1978 to Present)
5. Casamance Rebellion in Senegal (1980 to present)
6. Zimbabwe Civil Unrest (1980 to Present)
7. Sudan vs. Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army (1983 to Present)
8. Liberian Civil War (1989 to Present)
9. Nigeria vs. Cameroon Border Dispute (1991 – Present)
10. Kenya vs. Kikuyu Rebels (1991 to Present)
11. Algeria vs. FIS and GIA (1991 to Present)
12. Cameroon vs. Nigeria (1994 to Present)
13. Democratic Republic of the Congo vs. Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi (1997 to Present)
14. Congo Civil War (1997 to Present)
15. Namibia vs. Caprivi Liberation Army (1999 to Present)
16. Chad vs. Central African Republic (2002 to Present)

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"It's too expensive, so we are going to let you die"

NewsBusters links to a Morgen Richmond YouTube clip, this one of a speech that Robert Reich, who served as President Clinton's labor secretary, delivered on the subject in 2007:

I will actually give you a speech made up entirely--almost at the spur of the moment, of what a candidate for president would say if that candidate did not care about becoming president. In other words, this is what the truth is, and a candidate will never say, but what candidates should say if we were in a kind of democracy where citizens were honored in terms of their practice of citizenship, and they were educated in terms of what the issues were, and they could separate myth from reality in terms of what candidates would tell them:"Thank you so much for coming this afternoon. I'm so glad to see you, and I would like to be president. Let me tell you a few things on health care. Look, we have the only health-care system in the world that is designed to avoid sick people. [laughter] That's true, and what I'm going to do is I am going to try to reorganize it to be more amenable to treating sick people. But that means you--particularly you young people, particularly you young, healthy people--you're going to have to pay more. [applause] Thank you."And by the way, we are going to have to--if you're very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It's too expensive, so we're going to let you die. [applause] "Also, I'm going to use the bargaining leverage of the federal government in terms of Medicare, Medicaid--we already have a lot of bargaining leverage--to force drug companies and insurance companies and medical suppliers to reduce their costs. But that means less innovation, and that means less new products and less new drugs on the market, which means you are probably not going to live that much longer than your parents. [applause] Thank you."

As noted in our transcription, Reich's Berkeley, Calif., audience applauded the idea of taxing the young, killing the old, and stifling lifesaving innovations. One suspects that these ideas would not be greeted as warmly in most other American locales, which is why elected politicians who are actually trying to sell such ideas cloak them in euphemisms about "universal care," "reform," "cost cutting" and so forth.

How did Paul Krugman get it so Wrong?
John H. Cochrane[1]
September 16, 2009

Many friends and colleagues have asked me what I think of Paul Krugman’s New York Times Magazine article, “How did Economists get it so wrong?”
Most of all, it’s sad. Imagine this weren’t economics for a moment. Imagine this were a respected scientist turned popular writer, who says, most basically, that everything everyone has done in his field since the mid 1960s is a complete waste of time. Everything that fills its academic journals, is taught in its PhD programs, presented at its conferences, summarized in its graduate textbooks, and rewarded with the accolades a profession can bestow, including multiple Nobel prizes, is totally wrong. Instead, he calls for a return to the eternal verities of a rather convoluted book written in the 1930s, as taught to our author in his undergraduate introductory courses. If a scientist, he might be a global-warming skeptic, an AIDS-HIV disbeliever, a creationist, a stalwart that maybe continents don’t move after all.
It gets worse. Krugman hints at dark conspiracies, claiming “dissenters are marginalized.” Most of the article is just a calumnious personal attack on an ever-growing enemies list, which now includes “new Keyenesians” such as Olivier Blanchard and Greg Mankiw. Rather than source professional writing, he plays gotcha with out-of-context second-hand quotes from media interviews. He makes stuff up, boldly putting words in people’s mouths that run contrary to their written opinions. Even this isn’t enough: he adds cartoons to try to make his “enemies” look silly, and puts them in false and embarrassing situations. He accuses us of adopting ideas for pay, selling out for “sabbaticals at the Hoover institution” and fat “Wall street paychecks.” It sounds a bit paranoid.
It’s annoying to the victims, but we’re big boys and girls. It’s a disservice to New York Times readers. They depend on Krugman to read real academic literature and digest it, and they get this attack instead. And it’s ineffective. Any astute reader knows that personal attacks and innuendo mean the author has run out of ideas.
That’s the biggest and saddest news of this piece: Paul Krugman has no interesting ideas whatsoever about what caused our current financial and economic problems, what policies might have prevented it, or what might help us in the future, and he has no contact with people who do. “Irrationality” and advice to spend like a drunken sailor are pretty superficial compared to all the fascinating things economists are writing about it these days.
How sad.

That’s what I think, but I don’t expect you the reader to be convinced by my opinion or my reference to professional consensus. Maybe he is right. Occasionally sciences, especially social sciences, do take a wrong turn for a decade or two. I thought Keynesian economics was such a wrong turn. So let’s take a quick look at the ideas.
Krugman’s attack has two goals. First, he thinks financial markets are “inefficient,” fundamentally due to “irrational” investors, and thus prey to excessive volatility which needs government control. Second, he likes the huge “fiscal stimulus” provided by multi-trillion dollar deficits.

Efficiency.
It’s fun to say we didn’t see the crisis coming, but the central empirical prediction of the efficient markets hypothesis is precisely that nobody can tell where markets are going – neither benevolent government bureaucrats, nor crafty hedge-fund managers, nor ivory-tower academics. This is probably the best-tested proposition in all the social sciences. Krugman knows this, so all he can do is huff and puff about his dislike for a theory whose central prediction is that nobody can be a reliable soothsayer.
Krugman writes as if the volatility of stock prices alone disproves market efficiency, and efficient marketers just ignored it all these years. This is a canard that Paul knows better than to pass on, no matter how rhetorically convenient. (I can overlook his mixing up the CAPM and Black-Scholes model, but not this.) There is nothing about “efficiency” that promises “stability.” “Stable” growth would in fact be a major violation of efficiency. Efficient markets did not need to wait for “the memory of 1929 … gradually receding,” nor did we fail to read the newspapers in 1987. Data from the great depression has been included in practically all the tests. In fact, the great “equity premium puzzle” is that if efficient, stock markets don’t seem risky enough to deter more people from investing! Gene Fama’s PhD thesis was on “fat tails” in stock returns.
It is true and very well documented that asset prices move more than reasonable expectations of future cashflows. This might be because people are prey to bursts of irrational optimism and pessimism. It might also be because people’s willingness to take on risk varies over time, and is lower in bad economic times. As Gene Fama pointed out in 1970, these are observationally equivalent explanations. Unless you are willing to elaborate your theory to the point that it can quantitatively describe how much and when risk premiums, or waves of “optimism” and “pessimism,” can vary, you know nothing. No theory is particularly good at that right now.
Crying “bubble” is empty unless you have an operational procedure for identifying bubbles, distinguishing them from rationally low risk premiums, and not crying wolf too many years in a row. Krugman rightly praises Robert Shiller for his warnings over many years that house prices might fall. But advice that we should listen to Shiller, because he got the last one right, is no more useful than previous advice from many quarters to listen to Greenspan because he got several ones right. Following the last mystic oracle until he gets one wrong, then casting him to the wolves, is not a good long-term strategy for identifying bubbles. Krugman likes Shiller because he advocates behavioral ideas, but that’s no help either. People who call themselves behavioral have just as wide a divergence of opinion as those who don’t. Are markets irrationally exuberant or irrationally depressed? It’s hard to tell.
This difficulty is no surprise. It’s the central prediction of free-market economics, as crystallized by Hayek, that no academic, bureaucrat or regulator will ever be able to fully explain market price movements. Nobody knows what “fundamental” value is. If anyone could tell what the price of tomatoes should be, let alone the price of Microsoft stock, communism would have worked.
More deeply, the economist’s job is not to “explain” market fluctuations after the fact, to give a pleasant story on the evening news about why markets went up or down. Markets up? “A wave of positive sentiment.” Markets went down? “Irrational pessimism.” ( “The risk premium must have increased” is just as empty.) Our ancestors could do that. Really, is that an improvement on “Zeus had a fight with Apollo?” Good serious behavioral economists know this, and they are circumspect in their explanatory claims so far.
But this argument takes us away from the main point. The case for free markets never was that markets are perfect. The case for free markets is that government control of markets, especially asset markets, has always been much worse.
Krugman at bottom is arguing that the government should massively intervene in financial markets, and take charge of the allocation of capital. He can’t quite come out and say this, but he does say “Keynes considered it a very bad idea to let such markets…dictate important business decisions,” and “finance economists believed that we should put the capital development of the nation in the hands of what Keynes had called a `casino.’” Well, if markets can’t be trusted to allocate capital, we don’t have to connect too many dots to imagine who Paul has in mind.
To reach this conclusion, you need evidence, experience, or any realistic hope that the alternative will be better. Remember, the SEC couldn’t even find Bernie Madoff when he was handed to them on a silver platter. Think of the great job Fannie, Freddie, and Congress did in the mortgage market. Is this system going to regulate Citigroup, guide financial markets to the right price, replace the stock market, and tell our society which new products are worth investment? As David Wessel’s excellent In Fed We Trust makes perfectly clear, government regulators failed just as abysmally as private investors and economists to see the storm coming. And not from any lack of smarts.
In fact, the behavioral view gives us a new and stronger argument against regulation and control. Regulators are just as human and irrational as market participants. If bankers are, in Krugman’s words, “idiots,” then so must be the typical treasury secretary, fed chairman, and regulatory staff. They act alone or in committees, where behavioral biases are much better documented than in market settings. They are still easily captured by industries, and face politically distorted incentives.
Careful behavioralists know this, and do not quickly run from “the market got it wrong” to “the government can put it all right.” Even my most behavioral colleagues Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in their book “Nudge” go only so far as a light libertarian paternalism, suggesting good default options on our 401(k) accounts. (And even here they’re not very clear on how the Federal Nudging Agency is going to steer clear of industry capture.) They don’t even think of jumping from irrational markets, which they believe in deeply, to Federal control of stock and house prices and allocation of capital.

Stimulus
Most of all, Krugman likes fiscal stimulus. In this quest, he accuses us and the rest of the economics profession of “mistaking beauty for truth.” He’s not clear on what the “beauty” is that we all fell in love with, and why one should shun it, for good reason. The first siren of beauty is simple logical consistency. Paul’s Keynesian economics requires that people make logically inconsistent plans to consume more, invest more, and pay more taxes with the same income. The second siren is plausible assumptions about how people behave. Keynesian economics requires that the government is able to systematically fool people again and again. It presumes that people don’t think about the future in making decisions today. Logical consistency and plausible foundations are indeed “beautiful” but to me they are also basic preconditions for “truth.”
In economics, stimulus spending ran aground on Robert Barro’s Ricardian equivalence theorem. This theorem says that debt-financed spending can’t have any effect because people, seeing the higher future taxes that must pay off the debt, will simply save more. They will buy the new government debt and leave all spending decisions unaltered. Is this theorem true? It’s a logical connection from a set of “if” to a set of “therefore.” Not even Paul can object to the connection.
Therefore, we have to examine the “ifs.” And those ifs are, as usual, obviously not true. For example, the theorem presumes lump-sum taxes, not proportional income taxes. Alas, when you take this into account we are all made poorer by deficit spending, so the multiplier is most likely negative. The theorem (like most Keynesian economics) ignores the composition of output; but surely spending money on roads rather than cars can affect the overall level.
Economists have spent a generation tossing and turning the Ricardian equivalence theorem, and assessing the likely effects of fiscal stimulus in its light, generalizing the “ifs” and figuring out the likely “therefores.” This is exactly the right way to do things. The impact of Ricardian equivalence is not that this simple abstract benchmark is literally true. The impact is that in its wake, if you want to understand the effects of government spending, you have to specify why it is false. Doing so does not lead you anywhere near old-fashioned Keynesian economics. It leads you to consider distorting taxes, how much people care about their children, how many people would like to borrow more to finance today’s consumption and so on. And when you find “market failures” that might justify a multiplier, optimal-policy analysis suggests fixing the market failures, not their exploitation by fiscal multiplier. Most “New Keynesian” analyses that add frictions don’t produce big multipliers.
This is how real thinking about stimulus actually proceeds. Nobody ever “asserted that an increase in government spending cannot, under any circumstances, increase employment.” This is unsupportable by any serious review of professional writings, and Krugman knows it. (My own are perfectly clear on lots of possibilities for an answer that is not zero.) But thinking through this sort of thing and explaining it is much harder than just tarring your enemies with out-of-context quotes, ethical innuendo, or silly cartoons.
In fact, I propose that Krugman himself doesn’t really believe the Keynesian logic for that stimulus. I doubt he would follow that logic to its inevitable conclusions. Stimulus must have some other attraction to him.
If you believe the Keynesian argument for stimulus, you should think Bernie Madoff is a hero. He took money from people who were saving it, and gave it to people who most assuredly were going to spend it. Each dollar so transferred, in Krugman’s world, generates an additional dollar and a half of national income. The analogy is even closer. Madoff didn’t just take money from his savers, he essentially borrowed it from them, giving them phony accounts with promises of great profits to come. This looks a lot like government debt.
If you believe the Keynesian argument for stimulus, you don’t care how the money is spent. All this puffery about “infrastructure,” monitoring, wise investment, jobs “created” and so on is pointless. Keynes thought the government should pay people to dig ditches and fill them up.
If you believe in Keynesian stimulus, you don’t even care if the government spending money is stolen. Actually, that would be better. Thieves have notoriously high propensities to consume.

The crash.
Krugman’s article is supposedly about how the crash and recession changed our thinking, and what economics has to say about it. The most amazing news in the whole article is that Paul Krugman has absolutely no idea about what caused the crash, what policies might have prevented it, and what policies we should adopt going forward. He seems completely unaware of the large body of work by economists who actually do know something about the banking and financial system, and have been thinking about it productively for a generation.
Here’s all he has to say: “Irrationality” caused markets to go up and then down. “Spending” then declined, for unclear reasons, possibly “irrational” as well. The sum total of his policy recommendations is for the Federal Government to spend like a drunken sailor after the fact.
Paul, there was a financial crisis, a classic near-run on banks. The centerpiece of our crash was not the relatively free stock or real estate markets, it was the highly regulated commercial banks. A generation of economists has thought really hard about these kinds of events. Look up Diamond, Rajan, Gorton, Kashyap, Stein, and so on. They’ve thought about why there is so much short term debt, why banks run, how deposit insurance and credit guarantees help, and how they give incentives for excessive risk taking.
If we want to think about events and policies, this seems like more than a minor detail. The hard and central policy debate over the last year was how to manage this financial crisis. Now it is how to set up the incentives of banks and other financial institutions so this mess doesn’t happen again. There’s lots of good and subtle economics here that New York Times readers might like to know about. What does Krugman have to say? Zero.
Krugman doesn’t even have anything to say about the Fed. Ben Bernanke did a lot more last year than set the funds rate to zero and then go off on vacation and wait for fiscal policy to do its magic. Leaving aside the string of bailouts, the Fed started term lending to securities dealers. Then, rather than buy treasuries in exchange for reserves, it essentially sold treasuries in exchange for private debt. Though the funds rate was near zero, the Fed noticed huge commercial paper and securitized debt spreads, and intervened in those markets. There is no “the” interest rate anymore, the Fed is attempting to manage them all. Recently the Fed has started buying massive quantities of mortgage-backed securities and long-term treasury debt.
Monetary policy now has little to do with “money” vs. “bonds” with all the latter lumped together. Monetary policy has become wide-ranging financial policy. Does any of this work? What are the dangers? Can the Fed stay independent in this new role? These are the questions of our time. What does Krugman have to say? Nothing.
Krugman is trying to say that a cabal of obvious crackpots bedazzled all of macroeconomics with the beauty of their mathematics, to the point of inducing policy paralysis. Alas, that won’t stick. The sad fact is that few in Washington pay the slightest attention to modern macroeconomic research, in particular anything with a serious intertemporal dimension. Paul’s simple Keynesianism has dominated policy analysis for decades and continues to do so. From the CEA to the Fed to the OMB and CBO, everyone just adds up consumer, investment and government “demand” to forecast output and uses simple Phillips curves to think about inflation. If a failure of ideas caused bad policy, it’s a simpleminded Keynesianism that failed.

The future of economics.
How should economics change? Krugman argues for three incompatible changes.
First, he argues for a future of economics that “recognizes flaws and frictions,” and incorporates alternative assumptions about behavior, especially towards risk-taking. To which I say, “Hello, Paul, where have you been for the last 30 years?” Macroeconomists have not spent 30 years admiring the eternal verities of Kydland and Prescott’s 1982 paper. Pretty much all we have been doing for 30 years is introducing flaws, frictions and new behaviors, especially new models of attitudes to risk, and comparing the resulting models, quantitatively, to data. The long literature on financial crises and banking which Krugman does not mention has also been doing exactly the same.
Second, Krugman argues that “a more or less Keynesian view is the only plausible game in town,” and “Keynesian economics remains the best framework we have for making sense of recessions and depressions.” One thing is pretty clear by now, that when economics incorporates flaws and frictions, the result will not be to rehabilitate an 80-year-old book. As Paul bemoans, the “new Keynesians” who did just what he asks, putting Keynes inspired price-stickiness into logically coherent models, ended up with something that looked a lot more like monetarism. (Actually, though this is the consensus, my own work finds that new-Keynesian economics ended up with something much different and more radical than monetarism.) A science that moves forward almost never ends up back where it started. Einstein revises Newton, but does not send you back to Aristotle. At best you can play the fun game of hunting for inspirational quotes, but that doesn’t mean that you could have known the same thing by just reading Keynes once more.
Third, and most surprising, is Krugman’s Luddite attack on mathematics; “economists as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.” Models are “gussied up with fancy equations.” I’m old enough to remember when Krugman was young, working out the interactions of game theory and increasing returns in international trade for which he won the Nobel Prize, and the old guard tut-tutted “nice recreational mathematics, but not real-world at all.” He once wrote eloquently about how only math keeps your ideas straight in economics. How quickly time passes.
Again, what is the alternative? Does Krugman really think we can make progress on his – and my – agenda for economic and financial research -- understanding frictions, imperfect markets, complex human behavior, institutional rigidities – by reverting to a literary style of exposition, and abandoning the attempt to compare theories quantitatively against data? Against the worldwide tide of quantification in all fields of human endeavor (read “Moneyball”) is there any real hope that this will work in economics?
No, the problem is that we don’t have enough math. Math in economics serves to keep the logic straight, to make sure that the “then” really does follow the “if,” which it so frequently does not if you just write prose. The challenge is how hard it is to write down explicit artificial economies with these ingredients, actually solve them, in order to see what makes them tick. Frictions are just bloody hard with the mathematical tools we have now.

The insults.
The level of personal attack in this article, and fudging of the facts to achieve it, is simply amazing.
As one little example (ok, I’m a bit sensitive), take my quotation about carpenters in Nevada. I didn’t write this. It’s a quote, taken out of context, from a bloomberg.com article, written by a reporter who I spent about 10 hours with patiently trying to explain some basics, and who also turned out only to be on a hunt for embarrassing quotes. (It’s the last time I’ll do that!) I was trying to explain how sectoral shifts contribute to unemployment. Krugman follows it by a lie -- I never asserted that “it take mass unemployment across the whole nation to get carpenters to move out of Nevada.” You can’t even dredge up a quote for that monstrosity.
What’s the point? I don’t think Paul disagrees that sectoral shifts result in some unemployment, so the quote actually makes sense as economics. The only point is to make me, personally, seem heartless -- a pure, personal, calumnious attack, having nothing to do with economics.
Bob Lucas has written extensively on Keynesian and monetarist economics, sensibly and even-handedly. Krugman chooses to quote a joke, made back in 1980 at a lunch talk to some business school alumni. Really, this is on the level of the picture of Barack Obama with Bill Ayres that Sean Hannity likes to show on Fox News.
It goes on. Krugman asserts that I and others “believe” “that an increase in government spending cannot, under any circumstances, increase employment,” or that we “argued that price fluctuations and shocks to demand actually had nothing to do with the business cycle.” These are just gross distortions, unsupported by any documentation, let alone professional writing. And Krugman knows better. All economic models are simplified to exhibit one point; we all understand the real world is more complicated; and his job is supposed to be to explain that to lay readers. It would be no different than if someone were to look up Paul’s early work which assumed away transport costs and claim “Paul Krugman believes ocean shipping is free, how stupid” in the Wall Street Journal.
The idea that any of us do what we do because we’re paid off by fancy Wall Street salaries or cushy sabbaticals at Hoover is just ridiculous. (If Krugman knew anything about hedge funds he’d know that believing in efficient markets disqualifies you for employment. Nobody wants a guy who thinks you can’t make any money trading!) Given Krugman’s speaking fees, it’s a surprising first stone for him to cast.
Apparently, salacious prose, innuendo, calumny, and selective quotation from media aren’t enough: Krugman added cartoons to try to make opponents look silly. The Lucas-Blanchard-Bernanke conspiratorial cocktail party celebrating the end of recessions is a silly fiction. So is their despondent gloom on reading “recession” in the paper. Nobody at a conference looks like Dr. Pangloss with wild hair and a suit from the 1800s. (OK, Randy Wright has the hair, but not the suit.) Keynes did not reappear at the NBER to be booed as an “outsider.” Why are you allowed to make things up in pictures that wouldn’t pass even the Times’ weak fact-checking in words?
Most of all, Paul isn’t doing his job. He’s supposed to read, explain, and criticize things economists write, and real professional writing, not interviews, opeds and blog posts. At a minimum, this style leads to the unavoidable conclusion that Krugman isn’t reading real economics anymore.

How did Krugman get it so wrong?
So what is Krugman up to? Why become a denier, a skeptic, an apologist for 70 year old ideas, replete with well-known logical fallacies, a pariah? Why publish an essentially personal attack on an ever-growing enemies list that now includes practically every professional economist? Why publish an incoherent vision for the future of economics?
The only explanation that makes sense to me is that Krugman isn’t trying to be an economist, he is trying to be a partisan, political opinion writer. This is not an insult. I read George Will, Charles Krauthnammer and Frank Rich with equal pleasure even when I disagree with them. Krugman wants to be Rush Limbaugh of the Left.
Alas, to Krugman, as to far too many ex-economists in partisan debates, economics is not a quest for understanding. It is a set of debating points to argue for policies that one has adopted for partisan political purposes. “Stimulus” is just marketing to sell Congressmen and voters on a package of government spending priorities that you want for political reasons. It’s not a proposition to be explained, understood, taken seriously to its logical limits, or reflective of market failures that should be addressed directly.
Why argue for a nonsensical future for economics? Well, again, if you don’t regard economics as a science, a discipline that ought to result in quantitative matches to data, a discipline that requires crystal-clear logical connections between the “if” and the “then,” if the point of economics is merely to provide marketing and propaganda for politically-motivated policy, then his writing does make sense. It makes sense to appeal to some future economics – not yet worked out, even verbally – to disdain quantification and comparison to data, and to appeal to the authority of ancient books as interpreted you, their lone remaining apostle.
Most of all, this is the only reason I can come up with to understand why Krugman wants to write personal attacks on those who disagree with him. I like it when people disagree with me, and take time to read my work and criticize it. At worst I learn how to position it better. At best, I discover I was wrong and learn something. I send a polite thank you note.
Krugman wants people to swallow his arguments whole from his authority, without demanding logic, or evidence. Those who disagree with him, alas, are pretty smart and have pretty good arguments if you bother to read them. So, he tries to discredit them with personal attacks.
This is the political sphere, not the intellectual one. Don’t argue with them, swift-boat them. Find some embarrassing quote from an old interview. Well, good luck, Paul. Let’s just not pretend this has anything to do with economics, or actual truth about how the world works or could be made a better place.
[1] University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Many colleagues and friends helped, but I don’t want to name them for obvious reasons. Krugman fans: Please don’t bother emailing me to tell me what a jerk I am. I will update this occasionally, so please pass on the link rather than the document, http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/john.cochrane/research/Papers/#news.

Great Leader

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2009/10/07/school_kids_sing_for_health_care_reform_on_set_of_cnn.html

Varones

Canada's National Post:

Obama: “We must never stop until we see the day when nuclear arms have been banished from the face of the earth.”

Sarkozy: “We live in the real world, not the virtual world. And the real world expects us to take decisions.”

The rest of Sarkozy’s remarks were, well, remarkable:

“President Obama dreams of a world without weapons … but right in front of us two countries are doing the exact opposite.
“Iran since 2005 has flouted five security council resolutions. North Korea has been defying council resolutions since 1993. I support the extended hand of the Americans, but what good has proposals for dialogue brought the international community? More uranium enrichment and declarations by the leaders of Iran to wipe a UN member state off the map,”
he continued, referring to Israel.

The sharp-tongued French leader even implied that Mr Obama’s resolution 1887 had used up valuable diplomatic energy.
“If we have courage to impose sanctions together it will lend viability to our commitment to reduce our own weapons and to making a world without nuke weapons,” he said.

Mr Sarkozy has previously called the US president’s disarmament crusade “naive.”

1. If Pelosi and Co. wish to be taken seriously - Read the bills; Debate the bills loudly and publicly. Lets have a full and impartial discussion and analysis of what the bills will cost and whether they infringe on the Constitution. Partisan calls for unity suggest that Representatives work for the party or the speaker, not the people who voted them into office.
2. Stop the crocodile tears over dissent being mean-spirited. Nothing is more mean-spirited than elected representatives stateing they have not read bills that are voted on party lines. We did not elect you, give you DC staff, local staff and offices, and then become a rubber stamp for the national party. This goes for both parties.
3. The double standard over "Civility" is stunning; 8 years of boos in the house and "Chimpy-Bush-Hitler-Nazi" screams from protesters. Now seniors actually want to know how Government health care will affect them at town halls are disruptive? Stop the name calling and actually discuss issues. That is your job. Do it.
4. Medicare, Medicaid are functionally bankrupt. SSA is the biggest Ponzi scheme on the planet. Cash for Clunkers was a boondoggle and now sales are slumping. Given the track record, shouldn't we pick one of above, fix same, and then tackle healtthcare for then entire country?

Taranto on NEA

Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood is out today with new details on the National Endowment for the Arts scandal, including a full transcript and audio recording, as well as a CliffsNotes summary by John Nolte, of the notorious Aug. 10 conference call in which administration officials urged artists to help promote President Obama's legislative agenda.Formally, the call was led by Michael Skolnik, who is not a government employee. But Skolnik declares at the start of the call that he is acting on behalf of the administration:

"I have been asked by folks in the White House and folks in the NEA about a month ago in a conversation that was had. We had the idea that I would help bring together the independent artists community around the country."

Several administration officials also participate in the call: Nell Abernathy of United We Serve, part of the Corp. for National and Community Service; Buffy Wicks of the White House Office of Public Engagement; and Yosi Sergant, then communications director for the NEA (he has been "reassigned" since the scandal broke).
The administration participants seem to realize that they are treading on shaky ethical and legal ground. When one artist asks Abernathy "what we can do to help on critical advocacy issues like health care reform, cap-and-trade policy," she replies:

"Yeah, I can address that a little bit, and the reason only a little bit is largely because in my role at a federal agency, I'm precluded from going too far down the specific steps what people can do to advocate. . . .I could get that information to Michael [Skolnik] and he could get it out. We can't sort--as a representative of the corporation, I'm not capable of giving you more guidance than just sending you to the right person."

Yet she is capable of participating in the call. What happened after the call ought to raise eyebrows too. As Nolte reports:
Sergant then turns the call over to Thomas Bates from "Rock the Vote," who offers up an example of local environmental activism involving a garbage sculpture. Within days after this call Rock the Vote would launch a "health care design contest." A mere two days after the call a group of 21 art organizations endorsed health care reform.Of those 21 organizations, "16 of the groups and affiliated organizations received nearly $2 million in grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in the 150 days before the conference call." The NEA Web site describes its mission as follows: "supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established; bringing the arts to all Americans; and providing leadership in arts education." Organizing propaganda for the party in power is not mentioned, nor is financially rewarding politically friendly artists...This is not the first time the NEA has sparked controversy. Nearly two decades ago, during the George H.W. Bush administration, it was at the center over a battle over taste: The NEA had given grants to photographers who produced sexually explicit or religiously offensive work (Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano) and to "performance artists" who ranted and raved and took off their clothes (most memorably Karen Finley).We covered that NEA battle as a young writer for a sparsely circulated, now-defunct newspaper. It was a classic culture-war skirmish, but it was not especially partisan. Indeed, it was a Democratic Congress that imposed restrictions on grants for indecent art, while the Republican-appointed NEA head, John Frohnmayer, took the side of the target artists. Indeed, in 1990 we attended a lecture in which Julianne Davis, general counsel to the Bush NEA, described religious-right critics of the endowment as "our enemies" and falsely ascribed extreme theological views to one of them.It was obvious back then that much of the so-called arts community leaned left politically. At the time, Frohnmayer's NEA notwithstanding, the administration in power did not, so that artists could pose as oppositional figures, speaking truth--or at least shouting obscenities--to power.Now that their side is in power, however, that adversary attitude stands exposed as a sham. The so-called oppositional artists are only too willing to act as handmaidens of the powerful. We backhandedly salute the Obama administration for exposing this.Meanwhile, as with Van Jones and Acorn, the mainstream media have had little to say about this scandal. The New York Times hasn't even reported it at all. What we said about artists in the preceding paragraph applies to the so-called adversary press as well.

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/10582301/President-Obama’s-Address-to-Students-Across-America-September-8-2009

"Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president"

Jesus Christ.

Two Columnists in One! •

"Basically we have a world-class budget deficit not just as in absolute terms of course--it's the biggest budget deficit in the history of the world--but it's a budget deficit that as a share of GDP is right up there. It's comparable to the worst we've ever seen in this country. It's biggest than Argentina in 2001. Which is not cyclical, there's only a little bit that's because the economy is depressed. Mostly it's because, fundamentally, the government isn't taking in enough money to pay for the programs and we have no strategy of dealing with it. So, if you take a look, the only thing that sustains the U.S. right now is the fact that people say, 'Well America's a mature, advanced country and mature, advanced countries always, you know, get their financial house in order,' but there's not a hint that that's on the political horizon, so I think we're looking for a collapse of confidence some time in the not-too-distant future."--former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, interview with "Lateline," ABC (Australia), Nov. 3, 2004 •

"So new budget projections show a cumulative deficit of $9 trillion over the next decade. According to many commentators, that's a terrifying number, requiring drastic action--in particular, of course, canceling efforts to boost the economy and calling off health care reform. The truth is more complicated and less frightening. Right now deficits are actually helping the economy. In fact, deficits here and in other major economies saved the world from a much deeper slump. The longer-term outlook is worrying, but it's not catastrophic."--former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, New York Times, Aug. 28, 2009

Two Papers in One! •

"But the real significance of the spat [between Nevada and California] is that it furthers a dangerous and phony economic myth--that hordes of nomadic businesses are roaming the country, plopping down for a year or two in a tax haven and then packing up and moving on the minute a neighboring state bats an alluring low-tax eye. The fact is the come-hither look is useless: Relatively few businesses, once they're formed, pick up and move across state lines."--op-ed piece, Los Angeles Times, Aug. 27 •

" 'It just made sense for Toyota to pull the plug,' said Dennis Virag, president of the Automotive Consulting Group in Ann Arbor, Mich. 'When you look at states like Kentucky and Tennessee, California just isn't competitive in manufacturing with its taxes, regulations and overall cost of doing business.' The costs apparently outweighed a package of incentives put together by state and local officials in an effort to persuade Toyota to stay in Fremont."--news story, Los Angeles Times, Aug. 28

Amarillo Slim

You can go here to listen to a great interview with Amarillo Slim by National Public Radio, be shur to select the extended version.http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1273380

Slim’s Greatest Bets

1. Playing Minnesota Fats in one-pocket with a broom.
2. Taking 211/2 points on the Jets and winning a big bet on Broadway Joe in Super Bowl III.
3. Hitting a golf ball a mile on a frozen lake—inspired by Titanic Thompson.
4. Wagering that a cat could pick up a Coke bottle.
5. Betting on which sugar cube a fly would land on in an Arkansas jail.
6. Outrunning a horse for a hundred yards (no one ever said nothing about the race being a straight-away).
7. Holding a horse’s tail for a quarter of a mile in San Angelo, Texas.
8. Broad jumping farther than a superior athlete at Rogers Municipal Golf Course.
9. Winning the World Series of Poker at Binion’s Horseshoe in 1972.
10. Rafting down the River of No Return in winter in a wetsuit made by Jacques Cousteau–a bet that earned me $31,000 from Jimmy "the Greek" Snyder.
11. Beating Evel Knievel in golf with a carpenter’s hammer and betting that two out of thirty cab drivers in Dallas would have the same birthday.
12. Shooting free throws with a football against a Hall-of-Fame basketball coach.
13. Beating Bobby Riggs playing Ping-Pong with a skillet.
14. Beating a world champion Ping-Pong player with a Coca-Cola bottle.
15. Betting that a champion bowler couldn’t bowl seventy blindfolded (and that a driver with a little physical impairment could).
16. Finding (a) person who could eat a quail a day for thirty days.
17. Beating Willie Nelson out of $300,000 playing dominoes in Las Vegas.
18. Riding a camel through Casino El Mamounia in Marrakesh, Morrocco.
19. Pitching coins with Bob Stupak for $65,000 at the Orleans in Las Vegas.
20. Playing Larry Flynt head-up poker at the Fips Club in Los Angeles.
21. Betting a prominent politician that George W. Bush would win the 2000 Presidential election.

Taranto

Here's a blast from the past. The New York Times, July 9, 2001, reports on George W. Bush's first summer vacation as president:

On Friday, as new unemployment figures painted a newly troubling portrait of the American economy, Mr. Bush placed himself in the same scenes--golfing and fishing in a New England paradise--that once caused his father electoral grief.

Simply amazing.

Here's the Bureau of Labor Statistics report, dated July 6, that "painted a newly troubling portrait of the American economy":
The unemployment rate was little changed at 4.5 percent, five-tenths of a percentage point higher than the average for 2000.
As Barack Obama embarked on his first summer vacation as president last week--also in a "New England paradise," Martha's Vineyard--the most recent unemployment rate was 9.4%, more than double the summer 2001 figure. Covering the Obama jaunt, the Times offers no hint that there's anything wrong with a president taking a vacation during a time of genuine crisis. Indeed, it offers this justification:

Mr. Obama, whom aides described as being amused by all of the gloom-and-doom prognosticating over his health care agenda, did not even consider skipping his vacation. Last year, he talked about the importance of taking a break to avoid "making mistakes."

That makes sense--and in any case, it's not as if the president actually escapes his responsibilities when he goes on "vacation." But the Times's coverage of Obama is a useful contrast to the paper's petty partisan sniping against Bush.

Africa wants $67 bln a year in global warming funds
Mon Aug 24, 2009

By Tsegaye Tadesse

ADDIS ABABA, Aug 24 (Reuters) - African leaders will ask rich nations for $67 billion per year to mitigate the impact of global warming on the world's poorest continent, according to a draft resolution seen by Reuters on Monday.

Ten leaders are holding talks at African Union (AU) headquarters in the Ethiopian capital to try to agree a common stance ahead of a U.N. summit on climate change in Copenhagen in December.

Experts say Africa contributes little to the pollution blamed for warming, but is likely to be hit hardest by the droughts, floods, heatwaves and rising sea levels forecast if climate change is not checked.

The draft resolution, which must still be approved by the 10 leaders, called for rich countries to pay $67 billion annually to counter the impact of global warming in Africa.

It said there had been serious limitations on Africa's ability to negotiate in the past because of a lack of a coherent stance on global warming by African governments.

"The negotiating team need to be backed with the political weight at the highest level in the continent to ensure that the African voice on climate change negotiations is taken with the seriousness it deserves", the document said.

Madoff

At the Willard, Weinstein wrote, she learned one of his many secrets that they discussed by telephone a few days later.

“Bernie had a very small penis,” she wrote. “Not only was it on the short side, it was small in circumference. That he was now pointing it out to me was telling. It clearly caused him great angst. I wanted to be careful how I responded. Men and their penises have a strange and unique relationship.”

Still, she said: “I liked this man and didn’t want to emasculate him. His tiny penis hadn’t prevented me from climaxing.”

“On the bright side,” she concluded, because of its size, “oral sex would be a breeze.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aqmm.UC6lL6E

Paglia on Obamacare

"But who would have thought that the sober, deliberative Barack Obama would have nothing to propose but vague and slippery promises -- or that he would so easily cede the leadership clout of the executive branch to a chaotic, rapacious, solipsistic Congress? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom I used to admire for her smooth aplomb under pressure, has clearly gone off the deep end with her bizarre rants about legitimate town-hall protests by American citizens. She is doing grievous damage to the party and should immediately step down.

There is plenty of blame to go around. Obama's aggressive endorsement of a healthcare plan that does not even exist yet, except in five competing, fluctuating drafts, makes Washington seem like Cloud Cuckoo Land. The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities.

You can keep your doctor; you can keep your insurance, if you're happy with it, Obama keeps assuring us in soothing, lullaby tones. Oh, really? And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and specialists? And what if my insurance company goes belly up because of undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor? Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing.

I just don't get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy.

As with the massive boondoggle of the stimulus package, which Obama foolishly let Congress turn into a pork rut, too much has been attempted all at once; focused, targeted initiatives would, instead, have won wide public support. How is it possible that Democrats, through their own clumsiness and arrogance, have sabotaged healthcare reform yet again? Blaming obstructionist Republicans is nonsensical because Democrats control all three branches of government. It isn't conservative rumors or lies that are stopping healthcare legislation; it's the justifiable alarm of an electorate that has been cut out of the loop and is watching its representatives construct a tangled labyrinth for others but not for themselves. No, the airheads of Congress will keep their own plush healthcare plan -- it's the rest of us guinea pigs who will be thrown to the wolves.

With the Republican party leaderless and in backbiting disarray following its destruction by the ideologically incoherent George W. Bush, Democrats are apparently eager to join the hara-kiri brigade. What looked like smooth coasting to the 2010 election has now become a nail-biter. Both major parties have become a rats' nest of hypocrisy and incompetence. That, combined with our stratospheric, near-criminal indebtedness to China (which could destroy the dollar overnight), should raise signal flags. Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless to respond to changing conditions?

What does either party stand for these days? Republican politicians, with their endless scandals, are hardly exemplars of traditional moral values. Nor have they generated new ideas for healthcare, except for medical savings accounts, which would be pathetically inadequate in a major crisis for anyone earning at or below a median income.

And what do Democrats stand for, if they are so ready to defame concerned citizens as the "mob" -- a word betraying a Marie Antoinette delusion of superiority to ordinary mortals. I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.

But somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills. The ethical collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration's outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable "casual conversations" to the White House. If Republicans had done this, there would have been an angry explosion by Democrats from coast to coast. I was stunned at the failure of liberals to see the blatant totalitarianism in this incident, which the president should have immediately denounced. His failure to do so implicates him in it."

Cash-strapped Cuba says toilet paper running short
Mon Aug 10, 9:32 am ET

HAVANA (Reuters) – Cuba, in the grip of a serious economic crisis, is running short of toilet paper and may not get sufficient supplies until the end of the year, officials with state-run companies said Friday.

Officials said they were lowering the prices of 24 basic goods to help Cubans get through the difficulties provoked in part by the global financial crisis and three destructive hurricanes that struck the island last year.

Cuba's financial reserves have been depleted by increased spending for imports and reduced export income, which has forced the communist-led government to take extraordinary measures to keep the economy afloat.

"The corporation has taken all the steps so that at the end of the year there will be an important importation of toilet paper," an official with state conglomerate Cimex said on state-run Radio Rebelde.

The shipment will enable the state-run company "to supply this demand that today is presenting problems," he said.

Cuba both imports toilet paper and produces its own, but does not currently have enough raw materials to make it, he said.

One of the measures taken to address the cash crunch is a 20 percent cut in imports, which in recent days has become evident in the reduction of goods in state-run stores.

Cuba imports about 60 percent of its food.

Despite the shortages, prices will be cut between 5 percent and 27 percent for some food, drugs and personal hygiene products, officials said.

A visit to a store in Havana's Vedado neighborhood on Friday found that prices had dropped for mayonnaise, barbecue sauce and canned squid.

One customer, who gave his name only as Pedro, complained that "it doesn't look like prices have been lowered for the fundamental products" such as cooking oil.

Ana Maria Ortega, deputy director for military-run retail conglomerate TRD Caribe, said there will be no shortage of basic goods.

"The conditions are in place to maintain the supply of essential products," she said on the same radio program.

Cubans receive a subsidized food ration from the government each month that they say meets their needs for about two weeks.

President Raul Castro told the National Assembly last week that the government had cut its spending budget for the second time this year and has been renegotiating its debt and payments with foreign providers.

Cuba has long blamed the 47-year-old U.S. trade embargo against the island for many of its economic problems. It also said that last year's hurricanes did $10 billion worth of damage that forced the government to spend heavily on imports of food and reconstruction products.

Castro, who replaced his ailing older brother Fidel Castro as president last year, also has complained that Cuba's productivity is too low.

He has taken various steps to boost output, including putting more state-owned land in private hands and pushing for salaries to be based on productivity.

(Reporting by Nelson Acosta and Esteban Israel; Editing by Jeff Franks and Will Dunham)

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Global Warming and the Poor
Why India and China don’t care much about climate change.
By BRET STEPHENS

Comments (152)

A funny thing happened on the way to saving the world’s poor from the ravages of global warming. The poor told the warming alarmists to get lost.
This spring, the Geneva-based Global Humanitarian Forum, led by former U.N. General Secretary Kofi Annan, issued a report warning that “mass starvation, mass migration, and mass sickness” would ensue if the world did not agree to “the most ambitious international agreement ever negotiated” on global warming at a forthcoming conference in Copenhagen.
According to Mr. Annan’s report, climate change-induced disasters now account for 315,000 deaths each year and $125 billion in damages, numbers set to rise to 500,000 deaths and $340 billion in damages by 2030. The numbers are hotly contested by University of Colorado disaster-trends expert Roger Pielke Jr., who calls them a “poster child for how to lie with statistics.”
But never mind about that. The more interesting kiss-off took place in New Delhi late last month, when Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh told visiting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that there was no way India would sign on to any global scheme to cap carbon emissions.
“There is simply no case for the pressure that we, who have among the lowest emissions per capita, face to actually reduce emissions,” Mr. Ramesh told Mrs. Clinton. “And as if this pressure was not enough, we also face the threat of carbon tariffs on our exports to countries such as yours.” The Chinese—the world’s largest emitter of CO2—have told the Obama administration essentially the same thing.
Roughly 75% of Indians—some 800 million people—live on $2 a day or less, adjusted for purchasing power parity. In China, it’s about 36%, or about 480 million. That means the two governments alone are responsible for one in every two people living at that income level.
If climate change is the threat Mr. Annan claims it is, India and China ought to be eagerly beating the path to Copenhagen. So why aren’t they?
To listen to the climate alarmists, it’s all America’s fault. “What the Chinese are chiefly guilty of is emulating the American economic model,” wrote environmental writer Jacques Leslie last year in the Christian Science Monitor. “The United States passed up the opportunity it had at the beginning of China’s economic transformation to guide it toward sustainability, and the loss is already incalculable.”

He has more important things to worry about.

Facts tell a different story. When Deng Xiaoping began introducing elements of a market economy in 1980, Chinese life expectancy at birth was 65.3 years. Today it is about 73 years. The numbers are probably a bit inflated, as most numbers are in the People’s Republic, but the trend line is undeniable. In India, life expectancy rose from 52.5 years in 1980 to about 67 years today. If this is the consequence of following the “American economic model” then poor countries need more of it.
But what about all the pollution in India and particularly China? In Mr. Leslie’s telling, CO2 emissions are part-and-parcel with common pollutants such as particulate matter, toxic waste, and everything else typically associated with a degraded environment. They’re not. The U.S. and China produce equivalent quantities of carbon dioxide. But try naming a U.S. city whose air quality is even remotely as bad as Beijing’s, or an American river as polluted as the Han: You can’t. America, the richer and more industrialized country, is also by far the cleaner one.
People who live in Third-World countries—like Mexico, where I grew up—tend to understand this, even if First-World environmentalists do not. People who live in oppressive Third World countries, like China, also understand that it isn’t just greater wealth that leads to a better environment, but greater freedom, too.
To return to Mr. Leslie, his complaint with China is that it has become too much of a consumer society, again in the American mold. Again he is ridiculous: China has one of the world’s highest personal savings rates—50% versus the U.S.’s 2.7%. The real source of China’s pollution problem is a state-led industrial policy geared toward production, and state-owned enterprises (especially in “dirty” sectors like coal and steel) that strive to meet production quotas, and state-appointed managers who don’t mind cutting corners in matters of safety or environmental responsibility, and typically have the political clout to insulate themselves from any public fallout.
In other words, China’s pollution problems are not a function of laissez-faire policies and rampant consumerism, but of the regime’s excessive lingering control of the economy. A freer China means a cleaner China.
There’s a lesson in this for those who believe that the world’s environmental problems call for a new era of dirigisme. And there ought to be a lesson for those who claim to understand the problems of the poor better than the poor themselves. If global warming really is the catastrophe the alarmists claim, the least they can do for its victims is not to patronize them while impoverishing them in the bargain.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com

Denard!

Zelaya

The White House’s Latin Connection
Is Greg Craig driving U.S. Latin America policy?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203609204574312363465346516.html#mod=djemBestOfTheWeb