Paterno deserves the record

The Paterno-Bowden race looks to be over

Tuesday, March 10, 2009
By Ron Cook, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/sports/

The justice isn't that the Florida State football program, long considered by many to be dirty, is taking a big fall because of a widespread academic-cheating scandal. The real justice is that the NCAA punishment should cost Bobby Bowden any chance of finishing ahead of Penn State's Joe Paterno in the race to be major college football's all-time winningest coach. It would be a crying shame if Bowden ended up with that record. It would be one of the most fraudulent records in sports, right up there with Barry Bonds' home run record.

Paterno's 383 career wins are legitimate, Bowden's 382 are not.

It's not so much because of the slippery program Bowden has run over the many years, although that's a big part of it. Florida State hasn't been called Free Shoes University and the Criminoles for no reason. But what really would make a Bowden record tainted is that his 31 wins at Howard College -- now Samford University -- at the start of his long career count toward his total.
Included among those are victories against noted powerhouses Maryville, Southwestern, Gordon Military and the University of Mexico. According to the NCAA's bizarre guidelines, a coach gets to count all of his wins against four-year schools -- regardless of the level -- once he has coached 10 years on the Division I-A level.

That's beyond bizarre, actually.

That's why it seems only right that the NCAA could strip Bowden of as many as 14 victories because of the Florida State scandal involving 61 athletes in 10 sports in 2006 and '07.

There really is justice in this world.

The NCAA Committee on Infractions put Florida State on four-year probation Friday because of "major violations," reduced scholarships and ruled that the university must vacate all victories in football and the nine other sports in which ineligible athletes participated. Three former Florida State employees provided "improper assistance" to athletes taking online classes in Music Cultures of the World and Sports Psychology.

"Academic fraud is considered by the committee the most egregious of NCAA rules violations," the NCAA said in announcing its sanctions.

Florida State officials, who were praised by the NCAA for self-reporting the violations and cooperating during the investigation, are expected to appeal the vacated wins portion of their punishment.

"We already began implementing our self-imposed penalties [athlete suspensions]," Florida State president T.K. Wetherell said in a statement. "We just don't understand the sanction to vacate all wins in athletic contests in which ineligible student-athletes competed because we did not allow anyone who we knew was ineligible to compete."

You would think Wetherell and his lieutenants should spend their time doing a better job of helping the poor "student-athletes" who need to cheat to pass a music cultures course.

Not to be cynical.

If the NCAA sanctions hold and Bowden has to give up even a portion of the Seminoles' 14 wins from 2006 and '07, it will end any hope he has of catching Paterno. For one thing, Paterno, 82, agreed to a three-year contract extension in December and has shown no indication that he plans on stepping down soon. For another, Florida State already has named Bowden's successor, offensive coordinator Jimbo Fisher. Bowden, 79, must be out by January 2011, or the university must pay Fisher $5 million.

That's not going to happen.

The Paterno-Bowden race looks to be over.

College football will be better for it in the long run.

The only sad aspect to this unexpected ending is that some -- OK, Florida State fans and Bowden fans -- will turn things around and say Paterno's record is tainted because he didn't set it fair and square, that Bowden wasn't given the chance to beat him. That's nonsense, pure nonsense.

If anyone deserves a significant sports record, it's Paterno.

No, Paterno isn't perfect. He, too, has had his share of troubled players. Unfortunately, it happens at all schools these days. Paterno, like Bowden, also has stayed on long past his expiration date. It's pretty ridiculous that he coaches from the press box during games and often from home during the week.

But Paterno proved long ago that he's the greatest coach in college football history. He has done more for Penn State than any coach at any university. It says here he's twice the coach Bowden is and -- don't underestimate this -- 10 times the man.

The record has to be Paterno's.

That's only right.

That's justice.

Ron Cook can be reached at rcook@post-gazette.com.
More articles by this author
First published on March 10, 2009 at 12:00 am

The Left plays the phony umbrage card

DEBRA J. SAUNDERS
The San Fransisco Chronicle
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
http://www.sfgate.com/

I have known Rush Limbaugh since his old radio days in Sacramento, before he became a GOP god. I've disagreed with him over the years. Last year I took on his bashing of Republican moderates and criticized Limbaugh and other talk radio hosts when they were too harsh on not-yet GOP nominee John McCain. I've never apologized and we're still friends.

If you've watched cable news in the last week, you've seen how the Limbaugh story is playing. Limbaugh said he hopes President Obama "fails." As he explained, "I've been listening to Barack Obama for a year and a half. I know what his politics are. I know what his plans are, as he has stated them. I don't want them to succeed. If I wanted Obama to succeed, I'd be happy the Republicans have lain down."

Because Limbaugh used the f-word, Good Republicans are supposed to distance themselves from him.

Thus Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele called Limbaugh "ugly" and "incendiary." Not a smart move. Later Steele called Limbaugh to apologize - adding a new twist to a story concocted by Democrats.

As Politico.com reported last week, Demo gurus James Carville and Stan Greenberg first concocted the idea of making Limbaugh the GOP albatross last year after a poll showed that among younger voters Limbaugh's ratings were in the toilet. White House adviser David Axelrod and Press Secretary Robert Gibbs joined in the get-Limbaugh gambit, while White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel called Limbaugh "the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican party" on CBS' "Face the Nation."

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee jumped into the act and sent out an e-mail instructing recipients to send an "urgent call" for GOP senators "to denounce this shameful rhetoric." Key to the strategy are gullible partisans who fall for the phony umbrage of cynical operatives. Tens of thousands of outraged sheep - I mean, concerned individuals -have signed on, according to the DSCC.

"Shameful rhetoric?" Sorry, but the only thing that would make these operatives more gleeful would be if GOP leaders were caught in hotel rooms with hookers. This whole brouhaha is designed to get Republicans to snipe at each other and, perhaps more important, to distract voters from what is happening to their 401(k)s - after Democrats have thrown an extra trillion dollars at the economy.

"It's incredibly cynical," former McCain adviser Nicolle Wallace wrote in the Daily Beast. "It assumes that voters are too stupid to know the difference between a talk-radio host and a party's elected leaders."

This week, former Bush speechwriter David Frum foolishly bit at the worm. "Limbaugh is kryptonite, weakening the GOP nationally," Frum wrote in a Newsweek cover piece, "Why Rush is Wrong." Frum concluded that while he probably agrees with Limbaugh on most ideological matters, "The issues on which we do disagree are maybe the most important to the future of the conservative movement and the Republican Party: Should conservatives be trying to provoke or persuade? To narrow our coalition or enlarge it? To enflame or govern?"

Of course, the answer is: Both.

Yes, political parties need to reach beyond their ranks, but you don't win with an alienated base. Witness the Clinton-distancing Al Gore and the pro-Iraq-war voting John Kerry. Witness my guy, John McCain.

And you don't win without people who charge up the base. That's what Limbaugh does better than anyone. (And I say that as a "mushy" moderate conservative.)

While many think Limbaugh is enjoying the Obama-supplied spotlight, he was pretty steamed in e-mails to me. Divided government, he wrote, "is designed to ensure that the president fails when he is wrong. The framers wanted the country to succeed; if they wanted the president to succeed, they would not have saddled him with Congress, courts, a free press, and elections every four years."

"I can think of no pursuit more childish than an Oval-Office-initiated food fight with a talk-radio host," Wallace wrote. Apparently Team Obama sees the Limbaugh feud as an effective use of its time.

You can e-mail Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page A - 11 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Lyndon Baines Obama

By Patrick J. Buchanan
http://www.vdare.com/
March 09, 2009

It was the winter of conservative discontent.

Barry Goldwater had gotten only 38 percent of the vote, and his party had suffered its worst thrashing since Alf Landon fell to FDR in 1936.

Democrats held 295 House seats, Republicans 140. They held 68 Senate seats to Republicans' 32, and 33 governors to the GOP's 17.

Democratic registration was twice that of the GOP. The liberal press was gleefully writing the obituary of "The Party That Lost Its Head."

Decades might pass, it was said, before the GOP recovered from its fatal embrace of right-wing radicalism and foolish rejection of the leadership of Govs. Nelson Rockefeller and William Scranton.

Wrote Robert Donovan in the opening lines of his book, The Future of the Republican Party:

"The devastating defeat of Barry Goldwater at the hands of voters in all sections of the country but the Deep South has damaged, weakened and tarnished the party. For years to come ... the two-party system will be crippled."

Donovan and all the rest were wrong. The GOP came roaring back in 1966 to capture 47 House seats and eight new governorships. In 1968, Nixon led the party out of the wilderness and into a White House it would hold for 20 of the next 24 years.

Full of hubris in 1965, Lyndon Johnson had seized his moment. He had launched a Great Society that would outdo his beloved patron FDR. He would dispatch 500,000 troops to Vietnam to "bring the coonskin home on the wall" and create a "Great Society on the Mekong." Those were heady days of "guns-and-butter."

By 1968, LBJ's coalition was shredded. Gov. George Wallace had torn away the populist right. Sens. Gene McCarthy, George McGovern and Robert Kennedy had rallied the antiwar left against him. LBJ and Hubert Humphrey were left to preside over a shrinking center.

Why did LBJ fail? He overloaded the circuits. He tried to do it all. He misread a national desire for continuity after Kennedy's death as a mandate for a lunge to the left and a great leap forward with the largest expansion of government since the New Deal.

By 1968, racial riots had torn apart almost every great city. The most prestigious campuses had been rocked by student violence. Thousands of antiwar demonstrators had taken to the streets. And 100 to 200 body bags were coming home from Vietnam every week.

By the winter of 1968, Lyndon Johnson was a broken president.

History never repeats itself exactly. But Barack Obama is making the same mistakes today that LBJ made in 1965.

He has ordered 17,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan, as the situation deteriorates and the NATO allies pull out. He has no exit strategy. He has read a repudiation of George Bush as a mandate for a government seizure of wealth and power that exceeds anything attempted in the Great Society.

Fully half of the $3.55 trillion in spending Obama will preside over this year will not be covered by tax revenue but by red ink. The money will have to be borrowed from abroad or printed by the Fed.

Not only is Barack running a deficit four times as large as Bush's largest, he has called for $1 trillion in new taxes on America's most successful, who have already seen their savings and pensions ravaged.

He wants a cap-and-trade system to deal with a global-warming or climate-change crisis many scientists believe is a hoax. He is going to provide health care for all, including immigrants, millions of whom arrive uninsured every year. He is going to plunge scores of billions more into education, though education has eaten up the wealth of an empire, as SAT scores sink further and further below the apogee of 1964, before LBJ and the feds barged in. He is going to ask Congress for authority to spend another $750 billion rescuing the banks.

He is going to find the cure for cancer. He is going to ensure every kid gets a college education. He is going to drop half of all wage-earners off the tax rolls, while the top 2 percent, who already pay 40 percent of all income taxes, are forced to cough up more.

Obama is misreading the election returns. When America voted to cancel the White House lease of Mr. Bush, it did not vote Barack Obama a blank check.

By misinterpreting his mandate, Obama has accomplished something John McCain could not—unite the Republican Party and instill in it a new esprit de corps. For the Obama budget is an insult to the core belief of the party—that free people, not coercive government, should shape the character of society.

By daring Republicans to fight on the issue of a $1.75 trillion deficit, Obama has liberated the GOP from any obligation to him. He has come out of the closet as a radical liberal spoiling for a fight over an agenda of radical change.

Sooner than any might have thought, we have clarity.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com. His latest book is Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, reviewed here by Paul Craig Roberts.

Stern Words for Global Warming Alarmists

by Christopher C. Horner
http://www.humanevents.com
03/10/2009

Ironies and double standards can be subtle. And, in giddy “historic” times, the ironies can be absolutely blistering. For example, consider the media’s different contortions when covering the positions of presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama on the matter of a “global warming” treaty.

For example, last week the Obama administration proclaimed that expectations shall be lowered on that front and, for some reason, broadcast anchors eschewed rending of cloth and gnashing of teeth, and the print media couldn’t be bothered with the usual editorials and hit pieces masquerading as news items to condemn the seemingly rational assessment. The words in question came in a speech by President Obama’s “climate envoy,” former Clinton-Gore “Kyoto” aide Todd Stern, that the global warming agenda demanded of Bush was too ambitious and “not going to happen.” (To whom do you present your credentials as “climate envoy”? Mother Nature?)

Well, Stern certainly ruined my day, even if he did unintentionally raise a few questions about some things said back in the campaign. But wait: have faith, oh ye alarmists. The media silence is explained by things not being quite what they seem. More on which in a moment.

Stern’s remarks were covered only by the Wall Street Journal, and even then only described as having been delivered in Washington. In them, Stern even chastised those who might question this judgment with, “We need to be very mindful of what the dictates of science are.”

Oh. Isn’t this the guy whose boss said, within days of being elected, that “[t]he science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking. We’ve seen record drought, spreading famine, and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.”

Why, yes, it is, though of course Obama was either making that up or repeating a threadbare talking point of the crowd terrified of ever subjecting their pet hysteria (and now major revenue source for social engineering) to the acid test of debate.

So, instead of Obama’s climate envoy (I just can’t give up mentioning the title) reliably resorting to Moonbat science, Stern must instead have meant that actual research reveals there’s nothing within reach to replace “fossil fuels.” Hey, we’re a carbon–based economy, guys. Get over it. No matter how hard Al Gore blows, there’s not enough wind power and solar power available (nor will there be for decades, if ever) to provide a significant amount of the electricity America consumes. That is to say that hopping off the hydrocarbon train now would kill, oh I don’t know, billions. Which actually was the point of a paper in Science magazine in 2002 by, of all people, some leading alarmists (Hoffert, et al.). See, not all of the hysterics hate you for being beautiful.

Of course, regular HUMAN EVENTS readers know that Stern’s resetting of the rhetorical playing field is of a part with establishing new ground rules more accommodating to the new global warming sheriff in our town. The principal change is that of course Obama wouldn't be held to the standard to which Team Global Governance held the Bush administration for eight years: you must sign on to a global warming treaty now or the world will end and you killed it ... and, well, you know the rest if you weren't living on an island somewhere, enjoying a nice warm climate during the Bush-era global cooling.

This does not signal the global governance crowd giving up, of course -- just that they’re happy to let Obama find his own path to the mutually agreed end. U.N. officials have admitted as much, and that the guy therefore needs a break and some room to operate.

According to the U.N.’s chief eco-diplomat Yvo de Boer, Obama is new in office and, besides, his heart's in the right place, we know he'll do the right thing, but of course that Senate's always a problem. Odd, I was fairly attentive to this issue in 2001 after Bush indicated his intention to continue the Clinton-Gore policy of not seeking Senate ratification for Kyoto and, um, that’s not the approach you took at the time. I suppose this is “change” de Boer can believe in.

Testing our credulity a bit much, while also in town last week meeting with administration officials, de Boer greeted Stern’s assessment with the Orwellian glee of “we're really happy to see the United States back into the international climate change process.” By telling the world that what they urgently demanded of Bush to save the planet was, well, not in the cards. Got it.

Outside of de Boer, responses by the usual suspects among the green groups and Europeans were muted, consistent with the notion that Obama and they are on the same page. Now, you may recall similarly nuanced distinctions in how the intellectually dishonest global warming chorus treated, say, both the Clinton-Gore and Bush administrations sneering at the notion of asking the Senate to ratify Kyoto. Now, of course there’s nothing in the Constitution or statute requiring such a request of a signed treaty like Kyoto, but that wasn’t the point. By offering the alms of some lip-biting (his own, this time) and squishy rhetoric, one president was deeply caring and responsible, and the other burned in effigy for somehow setting the planet ablaze. Stern’s announcement surely will mean the lefties will scramble to find an unoccupied corner on which to protest this move. After all, their comrades have already filled the streets in outrage over his boss, Hillary Clinton, flying to China mere days before to assure them that little things like human rights won’t get in the way of addressing real crises.

What were those real crises far more important than such trifles? Why, the global financial crisis and -- wait for it -- global warming.

Ah. Protest cancelled. Man, these guys and their, for lack of a better word, “reasoning” are the equivalent of that Escher print hanging over the commode in every house party I attended in my 20s. Round and round and round we go. The estimable Mr. de Boer called this high-profile assertion of that hierarchy "a really important and encouraging step." Less than you demanded of the other guy is actually more. Other than that, nothing is too expensive if incurred in the name of addressing “global warming.” Uh, except debate.

Don’t ask. Being on the vanguard of revolution can be confusing.

Mr. Horner is author of "Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed."

Obama's fear-mongering

The president and his aides say they don't want to waste a crisis. That's a cynical way to exploit a national emergency.

By Jonah Goldberg
Los Angeles Times
March 10, 2009
http://www.latimes.com


Imagine a child falls down a well. Now imagine I offer to lend the parents my ladder to save her, but only if they promise to paint my house. Would you applaud me for not letting a crisis go to waste? Or would you think I'm a jerk?

I ask because I'm trying to come to terms with Rule No. 1 of the Obama administration.

"Rule 1: Never allow a crisis to go to waste," White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told the New York Times right after the election. "They are opportunities to do big things." Over the weekend, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told members of the European Parliament, "Never waste a good crisis." Then President Obama explained in his Saturday radio and Internet address that there is "great opportunity in the midst of" the "great crisis" befalling America.

Numerous commentators, including me, have pointed to this never-waste-a-crisis mantra as ideological evidence that Obama's budget priorities are a great bait-and-switch. He says he wants to fix the financial crisis, but he's focusing on selling his long-standing liberal agenda on healthcare, energy and education as the way to do it, even though his proposals have absolutely nothing to do with addressing the housing and toxic-debt problems that are the direct causes of our predicament. Indeed, some -- particularly on Wall Street -- would argue that his policies are making the crisis worse.

But the real scandal isn't those policies, even though they're bad enough. The real scandal is that this administration thinks crises are opportunities for governmental power-grabs (It seems writer Randolph Bourne was wrong. It is not war, but crisis, that is the health of the state).

Michael Kinsley famously said that a gaffe in Washington is when a politician accidentally tells the truth. As they say, it's funny because it's true.

But the White House tactic isn't funny at all. It's scary. Its amorality is outweighed only by the grotesque and astoundingly naked cynicism of it all.

Recall that not long ago, the first item on the bill of indictment against the Bush administration was that it was "exploiting" 9/11 to enact its agenda. Al Gore shrieked that President Bush "played on our fears" to get his way. In response to nearly every Bush policy proposal, from the Patriot Act to the toppling of Saddam Hussein, critics would caterwaul that Bush was taking advantage of the country's fear of terrorism.

The Bush administration always denied this, and rightly so. If the president admitted that he was using a national calamity for narrow partisan or ideological advantage, it would be outrageous. Indeed, every time Karl Rove or some other administration official said anything that could be even remotely interpreted as using the war or 9/11 for partisan or ideological gain, the editorial pages and Democratic news-release factories churned into overdrive with righteous indignation.

Well, now we have the president, along with his chief aides, admitting -- boasting! -- that they want to exploit a national emergency for their preexisting agenda, and there's no scandal. No one even calls it a gaffe. No, they call it leadership.

It's not leadership. It's fear-mongering.

Franklin Roosevelt said that all we have to fear is fear itself. Now Barack Obama all but admits that all he has to fear is the loss of fear itself.

In other realms of life, exploiting a crisis for your own purposes is an outrage. If a business uses a hurricane warning, for example, to price-gouge on vital supplies, it is a crime. When a liberal administration does it, it's taking advantage of a historic opportunity.

Obama's defenders respond to this argument that Obama's motives are decent, noble and pure. He wants to help the uninsured and the poorly educated. He wants to make good on his vow to halt those rising oceans.

But this is just a rationalization. Every president thinks his agenda is what's best for the country; every politician believes his motives are noble. The point is that scaring people about X in order to achieve Y is fundamentally undemocratic.

This was transparently obvious to Bush's harshest critics, who alleged that 9/11 was merely a convenient crisis for devious neocons who wanted to topple Hussein all along. But it's now clear that many of these critics simply objected to the agenda, not the alleged tactics. Now that it's their turn, they see nothing wrong with doing what they so recently condemned.

They even admit it, over and over again.

jgoldberg@latimescolumnists.com

Between the Covers with John J. Miller

James Mann on The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan
http://www.nationalreview.com/
March 9, 2009




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Today's Tune: Neko Case - Hold On, Hold On

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Islam Should Prove It's a Religion of Peace

Muslims can start with better Quranic scholarship.

By TAWFIK HAMID
http://online.wsj.com/home-page
March 9, 2009


The film "Fitna" by Dutch parliament member Geert Wilders has created an uproar around the world because it links violence committed by Islamists to Islam.

Many commentators and politicians -- including the British government, which denied him entry to the country last month -- reflexively accused Mr. Wilders of inciting hatred. The question, however, is whether the blame is with Mr. Wilders, who simply exposed Islamic radicalism, or with those who promote and engage in this religious extremism. In other words, shall we fault Mr. Wilders for raising issues like the stoning of women, or shall we fault those who actually promote and practice this crime?

Many Muslims seem to believe that it is acceptable to teach hatred and violence in the name of their religion -- while at the same time expecting the world to respect Islam as a religion of peace, love and harmony.

Scholars in the most prestigious Islamic institutes and universities continue to teach things like Jews are "pigs and monkeys," that women and men must be stoned to death for adultery, or that Muslims must fight the world to spread their religion. Isn't, then, Mr. Wilders's criticism appropriate? Instead of blaming him, we must blame the leading Islamic scholars for having failed to produce an authoritative book on Islamic jurisprudence that is accepted in the Islamic world and unambiguously rejects these violent teachings.

While many religious texts preach violence, the interpretation, modern usage and implementation of these teachings make all the difference. For example, the stoning of women exists in both the Old Testament and in the Islamic tradition, or "Sunna" -- the recorded deeds and manners of the prophet Muhammad. The difference, though, is that leading Jewish scholars agreed to discontinue these practices centuries ago, while Muslim scholars have yet to do so. Hence we do not see the stoning of women practiced or promoted in Israel, the "Jewish" state, but we see it practiced and promoted in Iran and Saudi Arabia, the "Islamic" states.

When the British government banned Geert Wilders from entering the country to present his film in the House of Lords, it made two egregious errors. The first was to suppress free speech, a canon of the civilized Western world. The second mistake was to blame the messenger -- punishing, so to speak, the witness who exposed the crime instead of punishing the criminal. Mr. Wilders did not produce the content of the violent Islamic message he showed in his film -- the Islamic world did that. Until the Islamic clerical establishment takes concrete steps to reject violence in the name of their religion, Mr. Wilders's criticism is not only permissible as "controversial" free speech but justified.

So, Islamic scholars and clerics, it is up to you to produce a Shariah book that will be accepted in the Islamic world and that teaches that Jews are not pigs and monkeys, that declaring war to spread Islam is unacceptable, and that killing apostates is a crime. Such a book would prove that Islam is a religion of peace.

Mr. Hamid, a former member of an Egyptian Islamist terrorist group, is an Islamic reformer and senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.

Presidential Double-Talk

Uncertainty (too much) and confidence (too little) define this crisis. Investors have surely noted the gap between Obama's rhetoric and his actions.

By Robert Samuelson
http://www.newsweek.com/
Published Mar 7, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Mar 16, 2009


WASHINGTON -- To those who believe that Barack Obama is a different kind of politician -- more honest, more courageous -- please don't examine his administration's budget. If you do, you may sadly conclude that he resembles presidents stretching back to John Kennedy in one crucial respect. He won't tax voters for all the government services they want. That's the main reason we've run budget deficits in 43 of the past 48 years.

Obama is a great pretender. He repeatedly says he's doing things that he isn't, trusting his powerful rhetoric to obscure the difference. He has made "responsibility" a personal theme; the budget's cover line is "A New Era of Responsibility." He says the budget begins "making the tough choices necessary to restore fiscal discipline." It doesn't.

With today's depressed economy, big deficits are unavoidable for some years. But let's assume that Obama wins re-election. By his last year, 2016, the economy presumably will have long recovered. What does his final budget look like? Well, it runs a $637 billion deficit, equal to 3.2 percent of the economy (gross domestic product), projects Obama's Office of Management and Budget. That would match Ronald Reagan's last deficit, 3.1 percent of GDP in 1988, so fiercely criticized by Democrats.

As a society, we should pay in taxes what it costs government to provide desired services. If benefits don't seem equal to burdens, then the spending isn't worth having (exceptions: deficits in wartime and economic slumps).

If Obama were "responsible," he would conduct a candid conversation about the role of government. Who deserves support and why? How big can government grow before higher taxes and deficits harm economic growth? Although Obama claims to be doing this, he hasn't confronted entitlement psychology -- the belief that government benefits once conferred should never be revoked.

Is it in the public interest for the well-off elderly (say, a couple with $125,000 of income) to be subsidized, through Social Security and Medicare, by poorer young and middle-aged workers? Are any farm subsidies justified when they aren't essential for food production? We wouldn't starve without them.

Given an aging America, government faces huge conflicts between spending on the elderly and spending on everything else. But even before most of baby boomers retire (in 2016, only a quarter will have reached 65), Obama's government would have grown. In 2016, federal spending is projected to be 22.4 percent of GDP, up from 21 percent in 2008; federal taxes, 19.2 percent of GDP, up from 17.7 percent.

It would also be "responsible" for Obama to acknowledge the big gamble in his budget. National security has long been government's first job. In his budget, defense spending drops from 20 percent of the total in 2008 to 14 percent in 2016, the smallest share since the 1930s. The decline presumes a much safer world. If the world doesn't cooperate, deficits would grow.

The gap between Obama rhetoric and Obama reality transcends the budget, as do the consequences. In 2009, the stock market has declined 23.78 percent (through March 5), says Wilshire Associates. The Wall Street Journal's editorial page blames Obama's policies for all the fall. That's unfair; the economy's deterioration was a big cause. Still, Obama isn't blameless.

Confidence (too little) and uncertainty (too much) define this crisis. Obama's double talk reduces the first and raises the second. He says he's focused on reviving the economy, but he's also using the crisis to advance an ambitious long-term agenda. The two sometimes collide. The $787 billion "stimulus" is weaker than necessary, because almost $200 billion for extended projects (high-speed rail, computerized medical records) take effect after 2010. When Congress debates Obama's sweeping health care and energy proposals, industries, regions and governmental philosophies will clash. Will this improve confidence? Reduce uncertainty?

A prudent president would have made a "tough choice" -- concentrated on the economy; deferred his more contentious agenda. Similarly, Obama claims to seek bipartisanship but, in reality, doesn't. His bipartisanship consists of including a few Republicans in his Cabinet and inviting some Republican congressmen to the White House for the Super Bowl. It does not consist of fashioning proposals that would attract bipartisan support on their merits. Instead, he clings to dubious, partisan policies (mortgage cramdown, union check-off) that arouse fierce opposition.

Obama thinks he can ignore these blatant inconsistencies. Like many smart people, he believes he can talk his way around problems. Maybe. He's helped by much of the media, who seem so enthralled with him that they don't see glaring contradictions. During the campaign, Obama said he would change Washington's petty partisanship; he also advocated a highly partisan agenda. Both claims could not be true. The media barely noticed; the same obliviousness persists. But Obama still runs a risk: that his overworked rhetoric loses its power and boomerangs on him.

Hansbrough, North Carolina seniors depart Chapel Hill in a stylish way

By Andy Staples
INSIDE COLLEGE BASKETBALL
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/basketball/ncaa/
March 9, 2009

CHAPEL HILL, NC - MARCH 08: Tyler Hansbrough #50 of the North Carolina Tar Heels with his father, Gene, before the start of their game against the Duke Blue Devils on senior night at the Dean E. Smith Center on March 8, 2009 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. (Getty Images)


CHAPEL HILL, N.C. -- She sounded as only a member of the dance team at a Deep South flagship state university can. She had just enough brass in her voice -- a voice that will serve her well when she's managing accounts, analyzing financials or selling McMansions in five years -- to seem perfectly justified in her intrusion on the quiet time of a campus legend.

"Come ohn, Psy-cho Tee!" she yelled Sunday afternoon as the legend walked back to the locker room from his final pre-game shootaround at the Dean Dome. Tyler Hansbrough barely noticed. North Carolina's all-time leading scorer wore the same expression he always wears before he pours another gallon of sweat onto the hardwood.

"Yup," he said.

Behind that blank stare, Hansbrough's mind spun. Later, after the Tar Heels had escaped from a suddenly dangerous Duke team with a 79-71 win, after fellow senior Danny Green had danced one more time to "Jump Around" and after Hansbrough bade a sob-choked goodbye to the North Carolina faithful, Hansbrough catalogued the litany of issues weighing on his brain as tipoff approached.

"It's a hard game to play," said Hansbrough, who scored 17 points and grabbed eight rebounds. "First of all, you're thinking about everything. You're thinking about your after-game speech -- who you're going to thank. You're thinking, 'Oh man, this is my last game in the Dean Dome.' Then you start thinking about how your college career is coming to an end. All that, and you're still trying to focus on the game to get this win."

"This win" was a fitting home sendoff for a 6-foot-9, 250-pound fireball who makes every basket, every rebound look labor-intensive. As Michael Jordan, Larry Brown, Sean May and a host of Tar Heel luminaries watched from the second row, North Carolina made just enough plays to dispatch a group of Blue Devils who have reinvented themselves in the past three weeks. The win clinched an outright ACC regular-season title for the Tar Heels, and it further cemented Carolina as a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament.

Even though Jordan's presence somehow inspired Hansbrough to channel the spirit of Jordan's former Bulls teammate Craig Hodges -- Hansbrough made his 11th and 12th career 3-pointers in the first half -- the Tar Heels couldn't shake the pesky Blue Devils, who got all their points from their starters. Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said the game came down to a handful of plays in the second half. Those plays, in order, were these:

CHAPEL HILL, NC - MARCH 08: The Duke Blue Devils huddle up against the North Carolina Tar Heels during their game at the Dean E. Smith Center on March 8, 2009 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. (Getty Images)

• After a Gerald Henderson dunk slashed Carolina's lead to 65-63 with 5:07 remaining, Carolina forward Deon Thompson scored while Henderson hacked him. Thompson also hit the ensuing free throw.

• After Duke guard John Scheyer (game-high 24 points) hit a 3-pointer to cut the Tar Heels' lead to 70-68 with 3:24 remaining, Green gave 21,750 reason to jump around by draining a 3-pointer of his own.

• Finally, after Duke forward Kyle Singler (23 points) made two free throws to cut Carolina's lead to 73-69 with 1:50 remaining, the Tar Heels needed to answer again. For the first time, they didn't. Point guard Ty Lawson, who played in spite of a painful big toe injury suffered Friday, missed a jumper. Singler grabbed the rebound with 1:18 remaining. Then, as Singler tried to throw an outlet pass, one of his sneakers grazed the baseline. Carolina ball. Lawson, a junior who may have played his final game in Chapel Hill, scored 14 seconds later.

Neither Krzyzewski nor his players could feel too badly Sunday about the way the Blue Devils played in a hostile environment against a Final Four-caliber team that would have done just about anything to send a group of beloved seniors out with a win in their final home game. On Feb. 11, the Tar Heels ran the Blue Devils out of Cameron Indoor Stadium, outscoring them 57-35 in the second half of a 101-87 win.

Other than the continued lack of an inside presence -- an issue that can't be fixed this season -- these Blue Devils seemed so much more capable this time of challenging an elite team. The paradigm shift came Feb. 19, when Krzyzewski inserted freshman guard Elliot Williams in the starting lineup. Essentially, he plunged a syringe of pure adrenalin into the hearts of the Blue Devils. Duke is 5-1 since, and it wouldn't seem the least bit shocking if Duke and Carolina meet next Sunday in the final of the ACC Tournament and Duke won. The Blue Devils lost Sunday because they shot 8 of 25 from the field in the second half. But they weren't taking bad shots; on another day, some of those shots fall.

"We want to be our best come the postseason. We're definitely the best team we've been now," Scheyer said. "That's as opposed to last year or the year before, when we may have been our best midseason."


Former UNC star Michael Jordan was in attendance for Sunday's game.
Bob Rosato/SI

North Carolina players noticed the improvement, but they couldn't allow the Blue Devils to ruin the going-away party for a group of players who cemented their place in the hearts of Tar Heels everywhere as freshmen on a defending national champ gutted by early departures to the NBA. Their defining moment that season? On senior day at Cameron, Hansbrough scored 27, fellow freshman Bobby Frasor made a pair of clutch free throws and Green stripped Sean Dockery in the waning seconds to help seal an 83-76 stunner against top-ranked Duke.

"Nothing," Hansbrough said Sunday, "has topped that yet."

So naturally, neither Hansbrough, Frasor, Green wanted to see their senior day ruined in a similar fashion. Tar Heels coach Roy Williams challenged his younger players to ensure the seniors got the proper sendoff.

"I always try to put pressure on the underclassmen," Williams said, "to send the seniors out the right way."

During late timeouts, long after the Tar Heels realized the Blue Devils weren't going away, no one spoke of the terrible pall a loss would cast on the traditional postgame goodbyes, when each senior gets his chance to address the crowd. No one had to say anything.

"There wasn't any talk," Hansbrough said, "but it was on everybody's mind."

And so every time the Tar Heels needed a play, someone came through. With 13.8 seconds remaining, Hansbrough checked out of his final game at the Dean Dome. After the buzzer had sounded and the Tar Heels had cut down a net to celebrate their ACC title, Hansbrough stood on the court, a microphone in his hand and tears in his eyes.

"It's kind of hard to put into words what my experience at Carolina has been like," Hansbrough said. Then he found the perfect words. "It's been the best four years of my life."

Bad News on Rodriguez That Could Turn Good for Yankees

By HARVEY ARATON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
March 8, 2009

Alex Rodriguez didn’t want to surrender to a surgeon. For the glory of the pinstripes, he was ready to play with pain, an indication he was hoping that fate had a much smarter plan for the restoration of A-Rod’s image than his army of well-paid spin merchants.


Alex Rodriguez with Derek Jeter, who has brought a type of leadership to the Yankees that Rodriguez seems to lack.

But the labrum tear in his right hip will require arthroscopic surgery on Monday and a prolonged stay on the disabled list. For the Yankees, a vacation from A-Rod may be just what the proverbial doctor ordered. If only temporarily, the face of the team will again belong to Derek Jeter, not Rodriguez, whom we have come to recognize in a variety of poses as the deer caught in the limelight.

Maybe the Yankees will hold their own with improved pitching, for which there was no shortage of off-season expenditure, and the brand of baseball that won them four World Series during a five-year stretch almost a decade ago. This is not to say that A-Rod is fundamentally unsound; it’s more his all-thumbs approach to life, his exceedingly unsubtle presence as the reigning clubhouse hub.

One day, he is mobilizing his public-relations machine in response to steroid revelations. Another he is deploying his children as props in a training camp photo opportunity. Rodriguez’s chronic transparency and heavy-handedness has become a metaphor for the Yankees’ inelegance and inconsistency dating to the American League Championship Series in 2004, when they dominated the Red Sox for three games only to be ghost-busted into a state of championship-identity disrepair.

The story of the Yankees since has been 16 runs one night, one run on three hits the next. What they need now is a better appreciation of nuance and timing. They need Mark Teixeira and C. C. Sabathia to add to what Jeter has brought to the ballpark for 13 years, qualities so difficult to quantify. You just know them when you see them, or hear them, because they galvanize rather than self-glorify.

For the first glaring example of what Jeter has that Rodriguez sorely lacks, go back to spring training 2001, when A-Rod was with Texas and he made the startling claim in Esquire that Jeter — at that point considered his good friend — was a player who is “never your concern” and who “never had to lead.”

In one of life’s delicious ironies, Jeter was presented with the opportunity to demonstrate precisely why he has most often been the opposition’s concern, primarily because of his capacity to lead.

“I’ll ask him tonight,” he said when cornered by reporters. “I’ll talk to him and let you know.”

By embracing restraint, saying nothing, Jeter passed responsibility for the uproar back to Rodriguez, where it belonged. He gave Rodriguez a chance to edit himself — as A-Rod had to do again after recently implying to reporters that he’d rather have José Reyes playing for his team than Jeter — and defuse a potential public feud between two of baseball’s glamour players. It was the verbal equivalent of laying down the perfect sacrifice bunt to put the winning run in scoring position.


Alex Rodriguez during a spring training game against the Cincinnati Reds last week

Many people would argue the public genius of Jeter is really just a strict policy of avoiding incendiary issues. Some members of the news media have extrapolated on that to call him boring. But boring is in the eye or ear of the beholder. To me, Jeter is not boring. When it comes to quotations, he just isn’t obsequious, or self-destructively dense.

His aura says: if keeping the back-page headline writers on 24-hour alert is the shallow measure of one’s commercial appeal, we can elect someone else most popular in class.

If asked a thoughtful question, Jeter will invariably provide a printable answer. But that’s only part of an overall evaluation. We live in a video culture, and when you think of Jeter, provocative imagery comes to mind — the flip play to nail Jeremy Giambi in the playoffs, the headfirst leap into the stands to catch a foul fly against the Red Sox, a thousand slides into second followed by a hard clap of the hands.

What is talk if you can’t be believed? Last summer, Rodriguez charmingly entertained waves of reporters for the full 50-minute player availability session before the All-Star Game at the retiring Yankee Stadium. Just a few feet away, Jeter made his exit in half the time.

Both repeatedly extolled the Stadium as a baseball shrine — but on the night of the game, A-Rod left well before it dragged into extra innings, while Jeter ran on the field like a delirious 12-year-old when the American League finally won in the bottom of the 15th.

No one will ever accuse A-Rod of not playing hard, but he does so with a self-imposed burden that weighs on people around him. That Seattle and Texas improved immediately after he left is hardly empirical evidence. But after all that has happened since the turn of the year, something tells me the Yankees won’t crumble while A-Rod is recovering for six to nine weeks. Given a break from all things A-Rod and good pitching, they may even thrive.

E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com

Where's global warming?

By Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe Columnist
http://www.boston.com/
March 8, 2009

SUPPOSE the climate landscape in recent weeks looked something like this:

Half the country was experiencing its mildest winter in years, with no sign of snow in many Northern states. Most of the Great Lakes were ice-free. Not a single Canadian province had had a white Christmas. There was a new study discussing a mysterious surge in global temperatures - a warming trend more intense than computer models had predicted. Other scientists admitted that, because of a bug in satellite sensors, they had been vastly overestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice.

If all that were happening on the climate-change front, do you think you'd be hearing about it on the news? Seeing it on Page 1 of your daily paper? Would politicians be exclaiming that global warming was even more of a crisis than they'd thought? Would environmentalists be skewering global-warming "deniers" for clinging to their skepticism despite the growing case against it?

No doubt.

But it isn't such hints of a planetary warming trend that have been piling up in profusion lately. Just the opposite.

The United States has shivered through an unusually severe winter, with snow falling in such unlikely destinations as New Orleans, Las Vegas, Alabama, and Georgia. On Dec. 25, every Canadian province woke up to a white Christmas, something that hadn't happened in 37 years. Earlier this year, Europe was gripped by such a killing cold wave that trains were shut down in the French Riviera and chimpanzees in the Rome Zoo had to be plied with hot tea. Last week, satellite data showed three of the Great Lakes - Erie, Superior, and Huron - almost completely frozen over. In Washington, D.C., what was supposed to be a massive rally against global warming was upstaged by the heaviest snowfall of the season, which paralyzed the capital.

Meanwhile, the National Snow and Ice Data Center has acknowledged that due to a satellite sensor malfunction, it had been underestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice by 193,000 square miles - an area the size of Spain. In a new study, University of Wisconsin researchers Kyle Swanson and Anastasios Tsonis conclude that global warming could be going into a decades-long remission. The current global cooling "is nothing like anything we've seen since 1950," Swanson told Discovery News. Yes, global cooling: 2008 was the coolest year of the past decade - global temperatures have not exceeded the record high measured in 1998, notwithstanding the carbon-dioxide that human beings continue to pump into the atmosphere.

None of this proves conclusively that a period of planetary cooling is irrevocably underway, or that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are not the main driver of global temperatures, or that concerns about a hotter world are overblown. Individual weather episodes, it always bears repeating, are not the same as broad climate trends.

But considering how much attention would have been lavished on a comparable run of hot weather or on a warming trend that was plainly accelerating, shouldn't the recent cold phenomena and the absence of any global warming during the past 10 years be getting a little more notice? Isn't it possible that the most apocalyptic voices of global-warming alarmism might not be the only ones worth listening to?

There is no shame in conceding that science still has a long way to go before it fully understands the immense complexity of the Earth's ever-changing climate(s). It would be shameful not to concede it. The climate models on which so much global-warming alarmism rests "do not begin to describe the real world that we live in," says Freeman Dyson, the eminent physicist and futurist. "The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand."

But for many people, the science of climate change is not nearly as important as the religion of climate change. When Al Gore insisted yet again at a conference last Thursday that there can be no debate about global warming, he was speaking not with the authority of a man of science, but with the closed-minded dogmatism of a religious zealot. Dogma and zealotry have their virtues, no doubt. But if we want to understand where global warming has gone, those aren't the tools we need.

Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.

Legalize Drugs?—Or See Mexico Become Afghanistan South?

By Patrick J. Buchanan
http://www.vdare.com/
March 5, 2009

Heeding the advice of Gen. David Petraeus, Barack Obama has committed 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan and will keep 50,000 in Iraq after U.S. combat operations end in August 2010.

Mexican soldiers on patrol in Ciudad Juarez, northern Mexico.

But are U.S. vital interests more threatened by what happens in Anbar or Helmand than in the war raging along our southern border?

Prediction: After all U.S. troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and Korea have come home, there will be a U.S. army on the Mexican border. For this is where the fate of our republic will be decided, as the fate of Europe will be decided by the millions streaming north from the Maghreb and Middle East, sub-Sahara and South Asia.

Last year, 6,000 Mexicans died in drug-related killings in a war where the tactics are massacre, murder, kidnapping and beheading.

President Felipe Calderon has ordered another 5,000 troops and 1,000 police to the border. Primary target: Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso.

Some 2,500 federal troops are already in Juarez, where in 2008 there were 1,600 drug-related murders. Gun battles occur every day. Nationally, 45,000 army troops and police are committed to this war that Mexico is not winning. For, according to the March 3 Washington Times, the Pentagon now estimates the cartels field more than 100,000 foot soldiers. [100,000 foot soldiers in Mexican cartels Numbers rival country's army, By Sarah Carter]

The chief of police of Juarez just resigned after a cartel threatened to kill an officer every 48 hours if he did not. To prove its seriousness, the cartel murdered four cops, including the chief's deputy. Last year, 50 police officers in Juarez were murdered.

"The decision I am taking is one of life over death," said Chief Roberto Oduna. The chief would seem to have a point. In January, his predecessor's head was found in an ice cooler outside a police station. The mayor keeps his family in El Paso, TX, as they have been threatened with decapitation.
Friday, the State Department declared, "Corruption throughout Mexico's public institutions remains a key impediment to curtailing the power of the drug cartels." Calderon retorts that, while the murders may be committed in Mexico, the cash and guns come from the United States.

With oil revenue down since the price dropped $100 a barrel, and remittances down from Mexican workers in the United States as the U.S. economy tanks, tourism, too, has begun to die. Beheadings in and around Acapulco have not helped. Warnings have been issued to U.S. college kids to avoid Mexico on spring break, as kidnappings for ransom are rampant. Restaurants and bars in Juarez that catered to folks from El Paso and soldiers from Fort Bliss are shutting down.

In February, in the resort town of Cancun, a retired army general sent to create elite anti-crime unit was kidnapped, tortured and shot. Mexican troops raided Cancun's police headquarters and arrested the chief and dozens of his officers in connection with the murder.

Add a collapsing global economy to a losing war with drug cartels, and Mexico is at grave risk of becoming a failed state, a narco-state, with a 2,000-mile border with the United States.

How does one win a drug war when millions of Americans who use recreational drugs are financing the cartels bribing, murdering and beheading to win the war and keep self-indulgent Americans supplied with drugs?

There are two sure ways to end this war swiftly: Milton's way and Mao's way.

Mao Zedong's communists killed users and suppliers alike, as social parasites. Milton Friedman's way is to decriminalize drugs and call off the war.

When Richard Nixon declared the War on Drugs in 1972, Milton, writing in Newsweek, objected on ethical grounds:

"On ethical grounds, do we have the right to use the machinery of government to prevent an individual from becoming an alcoholic or a drug addict? For children, almost everyone would answer at least a qualified yes. But for responsible adults, I, for one, would answer no. Reason with the potential addict, yes. Tell him the consequences, yes. Pray for and with him, yes. But I believe that we have no right to use force, directly or indirectly, to prevent a fellow man from committing suicide, let alone from drinking alcohol or taking drugs."

"Am I my brother's keeper?'" asked Milton, answering, "No."

Americans are never going to adopt the Maoist solution. For the users of drugs are all too often classmates, colleagues, friends, even family. Indeed, our last three presidents did not deny using drugs.

Once, a Christian America outlawed and punished homosexuality, abortion, alcohol, loan-sharking and gambling, all as criminal vice. Now, homosexuality and abortion are constitutional rights. Gambling and booze are a rich source of government revenue. And loan-sharking is done by credit-card companies, and not just the Corleones.

Will we raise the white flag in the drug war, as well?

Which is the greater evil? Legalized narcotics for America's young or a failed state of 110,000 million on our southern border?

Some choice. Some country we've become.


COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

- Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com. His latest book is Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, reviewed here by Paul Craig Roberts.

Global meltdown no sweat for Obama

He's all about growing government, not saving the financial system and other countries.

By Mark Steyn
Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/
Friday, March 6, 2009

The British Prime Minister Gordon Brown thought long and hard about what gift to bring on his visit to the White House last week. Barack Obama is the first African American president, so the prime minister gave him an ornamental desk-pen holder hewn from the timbers of one of the Royal Navy's anti-slaving ships of the 19th century, HMS Gannet. Even more appropriate, in 1909 the Gannet was renamed HMS President.

The president's guest also presented him with the framed commission for HMS Resolute, the lost British ship retrieved from the Arctic and returned by America to London, and whose timbers were used for a thank-you gift Queen Victoria sent to Rutherford Hayes: the handsome desk that now sits in the Oval Office.

And, just to round things out, as a little stocking stuffer, Gordon Brown gave President Obama a first edition of Sir Martin Gilbert's seven-volume biography of Winston Churchill.

In return, America's head of state gave the prime minister 25 DVDs of "classic American movies."

Evidently, the White House gift shop was all out of "MY GOVERNMENT DELEGATION WENT TO WASHINGTON AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT" T-shirts. Still, the "classic American movies" set is a pretty good substitute, and it can set you back as much as $38.99 at Wal-Mart: Lot of classics in there, I'm sure – "Casablanca," "Citizen Kane," "The Sound Of Music" – though this sort of collection always slip in a couple of "Dude, Where's My Car? 3" and "Police Academy 12" just to make up the numbers. I'll be interested to know if Mr. Brown has anything to play the films on back home, since U.S.-format DVDs don't work in United Kingdom DVD players.

It could be worse. The president might have given him the DVD of "He's Just Not That Into You." Gordon Brown landed back in London a sadder but wiser man. The Fleet Street correspondents reported sneeringly that he (and they) had been denied the usual twin-podia alternating-flags press conference. The Obama administration had supposedly penciled one in for the Rose Garden, but then there was that catastrophic snowfall (a light dusting). This must be the first world leaders' press conference to be devastated by climate change. No doubt President Obama could have relocated it to a prestige indoor venue, like the windowless room round the back of the White House furnace in Sub-Basement Level 5. But why bother? Some freak flood would have swept through and washed the Prime Minister and his DVD set into the Potomac and out to the Atlantic. And by the time the Coast Guard fished him out, the sodden classic movies wouldn't work in any American DVD player any better than in the Brit one.

He did, however, get to give an almost entirely unreported address to Congress. U.S. legislators greeted his calls to resist protectionism with a round of applause, and then went back to adding up how much pork in the "Buy American" section of the stimulus bill would be heading their way.

I would make a modest prediction that in 2012, after four years of the man who was supposed to heal America's relations with a world sick of all that swaggering cowboy unilateralism, those relations will be much worse. From Canada to India, the implications of the Obama ascendancy are becoming painfully clear. The other week Der Spiegel ran a piece called "Why Obamania Isn't The Answer," which might more usefully have been published before the Obamessiah held his big Berlin rally. Written by some big shot with the German Council on Foreign Relations and illustrated by the old four-color hopey-changey posters all scratched up and worn out, the essay conceded that Europe had embraced Obama as a "European American." Very true. The president is the most European American ever to sit in the Oval Office. And, because of that, he doesn't need any actual European Europeans getting in the way – just as, at his big victory night rally in Chicago, the first megastar president didn't need any megastar megastars from Hollywood clogging up the joint: Movie stars who wanted to fly in were told by his minders that he didn't want any other celebrities deflecting attention from him. Same with world leaders. If it's any consolation to Gordon Brown, he's just not that into any of you.

What Mr. Brown and the rest of the world want is for America, the engine of the global economy, to pull the rest of them out of the quicksand. Which isn't unreasonable. Even though a big chunk of the subprime/securitization/credit bubble axis originated in the United States and got exported round the planet, the reality is that almost every one of America's trading partners will wind up getting far harder hit.

And that was before Obama made clear that for him the economy takes a very distant back seat to the massive expansion of government it provides cover for. That's why he's indifferent to the plummeting Dow. The president has made a strategic calculation that, to advance his plans for socialized health care, "green energy" and a Big Government state, it's to his advantage for things to get worse. And, if things go from bad to worse in America, overseas they'll go from worse to total societal collapse. We've already seen changes of government in Iceland and Latvia, rioting in Greece and Bulgaria. The great destabilization is starting on the fringes of Europe and working its way to the Continent's center.

We're seeing not just the first contraction in the global economy since 1945, but also the first crisis of globalization. This was the system America and the other leading economies encouraged everybody else to grab a piece of. But whatever piece you grabbed – exports in Taiwan, services in Ireland, construction in Spain, oligarchic industrial-scale kleptomania in Russia – it's all crumbling. Ireland and Italy are nation-state versions of Bank of America and General Motors. In Eastern Europe, the countries way out on the end of the globalization chain can't take a lot of heat without widespread unrest. And the fellows who'll be picking up the tab are the Western European banks who loaned them all the money. Gordon Brown was hoping for a little more than: "I feel your pain. And have you ever seen 'The Wizard Of Oz'?" It's about this sweet little nobody who gets to pay a brief visit to the glittering Emerald City before being swept back to the reassuring familiarity of the poor thing's broken down windswept economically devastated monochrome dust bowl. You'll love it!"

"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn"? Oh, perish the thought. The prime minister flew 8,000 miles for dinner and a movie. But the president says he'll call. Next week. Next month. Whatever.

©MARK STEYN

Today's Tune: Nancy Sinatra - Bang Bang

(Click on title to play video)

Evangelicals and Economics: Reflections of a Conservative Protestant

By Hunter Baker
http://www.firstthings.com/
March 6, 2009

When I was a freshman in college, a woman who looked like a whole-earth hippie asked me if I had a personal relationship with Jesus. The question struck me as a strange one. Yet I found myself compelled to hear her out, and began to hang out with the young people in the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship chapter she led, even though their conspicuous use of the word “Jesus” and group prayer made me uncomfortable. Eventually, their faith became my own.

Adam Smith

At roughly the same time, my coursework in economics exposed me to free market thought. I was completely sold. Adam Smith. Friedman. Hayek. The virtues of the invisible hand excited me as much as my growing Christian commitment.

Laissez faire was nearly a second conversion.

As a budding libertarian, I felt distaste when I saw our InterVarsity chapter leader carrying a Bible study guide on social justice. She was benighted, I thought. To me, it appeared that the race-baiters, welfarists, and union apologists played on her soft heart.When my chemical engineer father complained about management decisions at his corporation that he felt maximized managerial bonuses for short-term results while damaging the ability of the company to compete over the long run, I defensively lectured him about the spectacular built-in intelligence of markets. The right thing would be done, I argued, because doing the right thing is ultimately profitable and efficient.

Several months ago, I heard a story that forced me to give more careful thought to my views on the built-in morality of the market. A large airline on the brink of bankruptcy in 2002 asked employees to make substantial wage concessions. They agreed. The airline returned to profitability, and management acknowledged that it had the workers to thank, but in the subsequent years, instead of restoring the wage concessions, it awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to executives.

When pressed by reporters, the airline’s spokesman said the bonuses were necessary to retain top managerial talent. Pilots and other airline personnel could not leave because the airlines’ seniority systems would require them to start over at a new company. In effect, the workers could not easily punish the airline for failing to pay them back, so it was in no hurry to do so.

The story jarred me. Somehow, I had never applied my Christian conception of a sinful world to corporate behavior. In hindsight I realize my faith should have cautioned me against too easily deferring to the idea of the sufficiency of the invisible hand to produce justice.

Reading Christians from the past reinforces the idea that the fusion of quasi-libertarian economics with Christian ethics is not always an obvious fit. G.K. Chesterton, for example, was tremendously concerned with the dehumanizing effects of a rapidly advancing free market economy. Catholic social thought has long resisted socialism while still sharply pointing out abuses in market economies. Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum is an excellent example addressing the “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor.”

Conservative Protestants, on the other hand, are largely absent when it comes to criticizing unfair labor practices, questionable methods of executive compensation, and other varieties of irresponsible corporate citizenship. My guess is that we tend to stay out of these areas is because we generally accept the idea that the market, left unhindered, will produce good outcomes. (I think the left feels the same way about sex.)

Experience and prudence have demonstrated that free markets are demonstrably better than other alternatives. But the problem is that we have tuned our antennae in such a way such that they pick up market problems like the promotion of hedonistic vice but do not take adequate notice of other wrongs. Thus, conservative evangelicals are quick to protest against 7-11 carrying Playboy magazine but are slow to call to account the corporation that deals with employees in bad faith.

Without Christ this is a world in which the strong will abuse the weak, the rich ignore or exploit the poor, and those with authority seek advantages for themselves as they exercise their power. We know these things both from the Scriptures and from examining our own hearts.

Francis Schaeffer

If our cultural critique is to have integrity, we must simultaneously respect the market and call the corporate sector to righteousness in its business dealings. As uncomfortable as Mike Huckabee’s concerns with executive compensation made many Republicans, his words suggested a healthy willingness critically to examine corporate behavior. If we question corporations when they produce bad products like pornography and gambling operations, then we necessarily accept the notion that the logic of free markets does not insulate them from critique when they commit other types of wrongs.

Francis Schaeffer (still a model for conservative Protestants) is generally remembered as an advocate for the Christian worldview. What has often been forgotten are his strong words about American materialism. Schaeffer lauded the hippies for their diagnosis of the ills of our society. Americans, he charged, are addicted to personal peace and affluence.

For a long time my natural instinct, the one that kept me deaf to the complaints of those claiming to have been treated unjustly, has been to defend the corporate estate against all criticisms. We must not be so passive even toward a system that has provided so well for most of us. Is the answer more government? No. The answer is to consistently call for righteousness.


- Hunter Baker is the author of The End of Secularism, to be published by Crossway Books in August 2009. He serves on the political science faculty at Houston Baptist University.

The Great Non Sequitur

The Sleight of Hand Behind Obama's Agenda

By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post
Friday, March 6, 2009; A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/

Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the "2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we have already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 -- 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.

Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama's tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that's a matter of scale, not principle.

All presidents do that. But few undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart of Obama's radically transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly offered that few noticed.

The logic of Obama's address to Congress went like this:

"Our economy did not fall into decline overnight," he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care and education -- importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.

The "day of reckoning" has arrived. And because "it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament," Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.

Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.

At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the banking industry. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful home buyers.

The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe.

And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing-in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.

What's going on? "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."

Things. Now we know what they are. The markets' recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions -- the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic -- for enacting his "Big Bang" agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.

Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy -- worthy and weighty as they may be -- are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com