America Already a Green Exemplar

Posted by Rich Trzupek on Apr 22nd, 2010
http://www.frontpagemag.com/

On this Earth Day, like every Earth Day, you’ll hear an awful lot about what you ought to do in order to save a planet supposedly in peril, but precious little about what you have already done. This year marks the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day, along with the fortieth anniversary of the passage of the Clean Air Act and the thirty-eighth anniversary of the passage of the Clean Water Act in their modern forms. Congress passed other environmental legislation, before and after, but nothing really compares to the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts when it comes to the scope of sweeping changes that these two environmental mandates have imposed on our lives and the unprecedented, almost unbelievable, record of achievement that these two Acts represent. Activists spend so much time instructing us to “go green” that the fact that we turned green forty years ago, and have done nothing but get greener ever since, is lost to all but the most astute observers.

Any dispassionate analysis of the record – and we’ll get to that in a bit – makes it clear that the United States has done a truly remarkable job of cleaning up the air, water and soil in this country. Every one of us has been a part of that and the money that we have expended to make green happen, should anyone ever account for those costs, would boggle the mind. You pay for green every time you purchase a vehicle chock full of the latest and greatest emissions controls. You pay for green with every check you write to your local utility, for without your increased financial obligations the utility could not pay for all of the new pollution controls that they have had to install. You pay for green in every gallon of paint you buy, with every trip to the grocery store and every time you crack a water faucet, for all of these acts, and hundreds more, factor in the cost of going as green as we have chosen to go. Yet, in spite of all you have done simply by tacitly accepting the need to “save the planet” and quietly paying whatever price was demanded, it’s not nearly enough for the environmental movement. On this Earth Day, like every Earth Day, they’ll metaphorically their wag their fingers and tell you that you need to do more. What organizations like Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and the National Resources Defense Council never do on Earth Day, because it would constitute financial suicide if they did, is to extend a hand and say “thank you” in recognition of all that you have accomplished.

Just what have you accomplished? In less than half a century you have funded a series of initiatives that has proven to, should someone actually dare to employ any objective means of measurement, forever shattered the image of America as the world’s cesspool. When the Clean Water Act was passed, lakes were declared “dead” and rivers were burning. Thirty eight years later, such images have disappeared in popular culture. Public and private sewage treatment plants are subject to such stringent standards and tight oversight that regulatory agencies have increasingly been forced to turn their attentions to stormwater run-off in order to find a purpose. Before the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) was passed in 1980, unlicensed landfills and “midnight dumping” created scores of toxics hot spots each year. Today, such occurrences are so rare that a generation of attorneys who made their livings negotiating CERCLA settlements are desperately looking for something else to do. But nowhere has the green progress we have made been so evident, if so roundly ignored, than in terms of air pollution.

In 1970 Congress identified six air pollutants, the so-called “big six,” that represented the biggest threat to human health and the environment. The United States Environmental Protection Agency was charged with the task of reducing emissions of these air pollutants. In turn, USEPA developed comprehensive programs that you and I ultimately paid for, not just in terms of tax dollars, but in the costs of the goods and services we use every day. The results have been stunning. Though we use about double the amount of energy today as compared to 1970, while driving our cars and using our electronic gadgets, the amount of air pollution – in terms of the big six – has been cut in half as compared to 1970. Way to go America. Thanks are most definitely in order, but don’t hold your breath waiting for Greenpeace to express its gratitude.

The core reason that global warming is an issue at all in 2010 is directly connected to all of the progress we have made since 1970. Environmental groups are big businesses and the product that they sell is fear. The more successful the Clean Air Act was, the harder it became for groups like the Sierra Club to sell the apocalyptic scenarios necessary to keep donations rolling in. Thus a once obscure theory, ultimately disowned by its originator – that an inert, relatively weak greenhouse gas would result in catastrophic climate change – resonated among the environmental groups. This “issue,” such as it was, was so big that it would guarantee that donations would continue to roll in for years to come.

Many conservatives view greenhouse gas initiatives as another manifestation of leftist, statist control fantasies. Ultimately, that’s the effect, but I don’t think that reflects the origin of this particular liberal love affair. A few scientists had a theory and some leftists and environmentalists (same thing) realized that supporting and funding “research” about that particular theory would help them advance their agenda in all sorts of interesting new ways. In my view, global warming hysteria has been a matter of opportunism, not careful planning.
But then global warming hysteria is just the latest variation on a tired theme: that human beings are a pox on the planet. The environment of the United States need some work in 1970. Forty years later, we’re in pretty good shape and the fact that we can say so is almost entirely because to you. Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the National Resources Defense Council and all the rest can’t bring themselves to say it, but allow me to offer my gratitude. You’ve done a good job America. Don’t let anyone tell you that you haven’t.

Tea Partiers a Delayed Bush Backlash

By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.townhall.com/
April 21, 2010

I attended the Cincinnati Tax Day Tea Party rally as a speaker. But it was more interesting to be an observer.

First, here's what I didn't see. I didn't see a single racist or bigoted sign or hear a single such comment. Nor did I see any evidence of "homegrown fascism." Though in fairness, such things are often in the eye of the beholder, now that dissent has gone from being the highest form of patriotism under George W. Bush to the most common form of racism under Barack Obama.

But I did see something a lot of people, on both the left and the right, seemed to have missed: a delayed Bush backlash.

One of the more widespread anti-tea party arguments goes like this: Republicans didn't protest very much when Bush ran up deficits and expanded government, so when Obama does the same thing (albeit on a far grander scale), Republican complaints can't be sincere.

This lazy sophistry opens the door to liberals' preferred argument: racism. "No student of American history," writes Paul Butler in the New York Times, "would be surprised to learn that when the United States elects its first non-white president, a strong anti-government movement rises up."

Butler, a law professor and author of the no-doubt-seminal "Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice," speaks for many in the media when he insinuates that nearly unprecedented stimulus spending combined with government takeovers of the health care, banking and automotive industries are dwarfed in importance by Obama's skin color.

I speak for many who have actually spoken to tea partiers when I say that is slanderous hogwash.

But how, then, to explain the relative right-wing quiescence on Bush's watch and fiscal Puritanism on Obama's?

No doubt partisanship plays a role. But partisanship only explains so much given that the tea partiers are clearly sincere about limited government and often quite fond of Republican-bashing. So here's an alternative explanation: Conservatives don't want to be fooled again.

Recall that Bush came into office promising to be a "different kind of conservative," and one of his first legislative victories was the No Child Left Behind Act, sponsored by Teddy Kennedy.

Throughout his presidency, Bush's "compassionate conservatism" surrendered -- either rhetorically or substantively -- to the assumptions of welfare state liberalism, i.e. that your decency was best measured by your commitment to large, inefficient government programs. "When somebody hurts," Bush insisted, "government has got to move."

Many conservatives disliked this whole mind-set and the policies behind it, from comprehensive immigration reform to Medicare Part D.

Many conservatives muted their objections, in part because they actually liked the man personally or because they approved of his stances on tax cuts, judges, abortion and, most important, the war on terror (we can see a similar dynamic with so many antiwar liberals who still support Obama).

Conservatives didn't necessarily bite their tongues (remember the Harriet Miers and immigration fiascoes), but they did prioritize supporting Bush -- often in the face of far nastier attacks than Obama has received -- over ideological purity. Besides, where were conservatives supposed to go? Into the arms of John Kerry?

The 2008 GOP primaries compounded conservative frustration. Because there was no stand-in for Bush in the contest, there was no obvious outlet for anger at Bush's years of pre-surge Iraq bungling or his decision to outsource domestic spending to Republican congressional ward-heelers. Then, as a lame duck, Bush laid down the predicates for much of Obama's first 100 days, supporting both a stimulus and Wall Street bailouts. As one participant of the D.C. Tea Party rally told the Washington Examiner's Byron York, "George Bush opened the door for Barack Obama and the Democrats to walk in."

According to last week's NYT/CBS poll of tea party supporters, 57 percent have a favorable view of Bush, but that hardly captures the nuance of tea party feelings. For instance, when Bush's face appeared on the Jumbotron in the arena, the Cincinnati audience applauded. When speakers criticized Bush and the GOP for "losing their way," the audience applauded even louder.

Going by what I saw in Cincinnati, second to a profound desire to rein in government, the chief attitude driving the 39 percent of tea partiers who describe themselves as "very conservative" isn't partisanship, racism or seizing the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. It's "we won't be fooled again." In the near term, that spells trouble for Obama and Democrats. In the long term, that lays down a serious gauntlet for Republicans.

A warning on Iran

Gates keeping admin honest

By Ralph Peters
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com
April 21, 2010

Robert Gates isn't just our secretary of defense -- he's our national damage-control officer.

The closest thing this love-your-enemies administration has to an indispensable man, Gates is fighting the good fight in the worst of times.

Ever since signing on as President George W. Bush's SecDef in early 2005, Gates has fought to reform the Air Force, improve the Pentagon's dysfunctional acquisition system, give our troops in the field what they really need and cut through the red tape that's paid for in red blood.

The greatest sacrifice any top-echelon public figure has made in decades was Gates' agreement to stay at his post and serve the new administration. He wanted to go back to Texas. Instead, he stood up in the line of fire.


Vital work: SecDef Gates is limiting the harm the Obama team's inflicting on our national security.(AP)

That new administration's rapidly getting old, but Gates continues to serve, struggling to limit the damage done to our national defense.

Recently, he fought to keep our new nuclear-giveaway treaty with Russia within tolerable bounds. That treaty's bad -- but without Gates it would have been worse. Now we know that he was also pushing on Iran.

Last week, somebody (not Gates) leaked a January memo the SecDef sent to the White House. The message? We need to prepare for all contingencies regarding Iran. Now.

The New York Times reported the leak breathlessly and vaguely. But Gates was just doing his duty -- saying, essentially, Mr. President, you may hope that Russia and China will support meaningful sanctions, and you may hope that Iran will give up its nuclear ambitions, but it would be irresponsible not to plan for the worst.

If forced to take military action against Iran, we'd better have a realistic plan. The president couldn't just phone the SecDef one fine morning and tell him to take out Iran that afternoon. It may work that way in Hollywood, but reality's another matter.

A serious campaign against Iran's nuclear program wouldn't be a matter of a few quick pinpoint strikes, but of massively complex coordination, from positioning forces and prepping allies, to airspace management (a devilish challenge in a surprise attack, with commercial aircraft everywhere) and protecting the region's energy infrastructure.

War planning isn't just about getting the initial attack right, but involves calculating how to respond to the actions the enemy could take after the bombs start hitting. The planning process also identifies previously unrecognized vulnerabilities and challenges.

All plans evolve once the bullets fly, but the more rigorous your preparation, the readier you are to deal with the full range of consequences.

Our military knows how to plan. The problem -- a bipartisan one -- is that Washington elites don't want the military to plan for realistic scenarios. Because serious planning makes the costs and dangers of policies all too clear.

We first saw this see-no-evil pattern under President Bush, when Pentagon neo-cons (with no military experience) forbade planning for an occupation of Iraq. They didn't just refuse to acknowledge any possible need for an occupation, they feared that detailed planning would reveal the potential costs of taking down Saddam -- numbers that might've been a red flag to Congress.

The consequences of failing to plan? The price we paid after reaching Baghdad without a "what now?" plan was vastly higher in lives and dollars than it should have been.

Now we face a similar threat from the other side of the aisle. Peace-at-any-price zealots don't want a military strike against Iran's nuclear program, no matter what. Their avoidance technique is to prevent serious military planning -- under the principle that, "If we don't prepare for it, it can't happen."

Once again, we may end up sending in our forces under disastrous political restrictions, with unrealistic goals and inadequate resources. Gates is doing his damnedest to prevent that.

Yet grumpy conservatives mumble that he should resign in protest over Obama's policies.

Really? You want Gates gone? Who do you think this administration would nominate to take his place? William Tecumseh Sherman?

One man stands between a willfully naive administration and a colossal bloody mess in the Persian Gulf: Bob Gates, American hero.

Ralph Peters' new book is "Endless War."

Myths About Capitalism

By John Stossel
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/
April 21, 2010

I won 19 Emmy Awards by reporting a myth: that business constantly rips us off -- that capitalism is mostly cruel and unfair.

I know that's a myth now. So I was glad to see the publication of "The 5 Big Lies About American Business" by Michael Medved.

"You can only make a profit in this country by giving people a product or a service that they want," Medved recently told me. "It's the golden rule in action."

Medved used to write about the movies, so he's familiar with the businessman as villain. I'll play a clip from the movie "Syriana," in which an oil tycoon makes this ridiculous speech:

"Corruption keeps us safe and warm. Corruption is why you and I are prancing around in here instead of fighting over scraps of meat out in the street."

"What's interesting," Medved commented, "is that in the old days, Hollywood would have businesspeople who were very positive: George Bailey, the Jimmy Stewart character, is a banker in 'It's a Wonderful Life.'"

No longer. Today's movie capitalists are criminals or playboys. Apparently, Hollywood writers think it's plausible that CEOs have lots of time to sip cocktails and chase women.

"In school, we all studied a book called "The Theory of the Leisure Class," which ... indicted the leisure class and these people who were out there exploiting other people and really had nothing to do except sit on their yachts and go to their swimming pools and their vacations."

In real life, that's nonsense.

"The higher up on the income scale you go, the less leisure time you have. You make money in this country by working hard."

Medved's second myth is that when the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. This is the old zero-sum fallacy, which ignores that when two people engage in free exchange, both gain -- or they wouldn't have traded. It's what I call the double thank-you phenomenon. I understand why politicians and lawyers believe it: It's true in their world. But it's not true in business.

"If you believe that when the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, then you believe that creating wealth causes poverty, and you're an idiot," said Medved. "One of the things that I hate is this term 'obscene profits.' There are no obscene profits ... . (The current economic downturn shows) "that when the rich get poorer ... everybody gets poorer."

Myth No. 3: Government is more fair and reliable than business.

"Remember the last time you went into Starbucks, and then remember the last time you went into the DMV to get your license," Medved said. "Where did you get better treated? And it's not because the barista is some kind of idealist or humanitarian. She wants a tip. She wants you to come back to the Starbucks ... ."

But the left doesn't get it.

"This is the suspicion of the profit motive -- the idea that if somebody is selflessly serving me, they're going to treat me better than somebody who wants to make a buck," Medved said. But "(i)f you think about it in your own life, if somebody is benefiting from his interaction with you ... it's a far more reliable kind of interaction than someone who comes and says I'm in this only for you."

Myth No. 4: The current downturn means the death of capitalism.

"Capitalism is alive and well," Medved said.

I'm also bugged when people argue that today's problems prove that capitalism "failed." What failed? We had a correction. A bubble popped. But from 1982 to now, the Dow rose from 800 to 11,000. Had it happened without the bubble, we'd say this is one of the great boom periods.

Medved added: "This is one of the biggest lies -- the idea that because of capitalism, we're all suffering. ... Poor people in America today, people who are officially in poverty, have a higher standard of living in terms of medical standards, in terms of the chances of going to college, in terms of the way people live, than middle-class people did 30 years ago. It's an extraordinary achievement of technology and of the profit sector."


Copyright 2010, Creators Syndicate Inc

The Scandal of Solar Power in Spain

[Chris Horner]
http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/
Wednesday, April 21, 2010

“Think about what’s happening in countries like Spain.” It seems so long ago that Barack Obama thus instructed us — eight times — to ponder his model for a “green jobs” economy. Regular readers of Planet Gore — and particularly those who read Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America — know the backstory on Spain’s embrace of renewables. It was just over one year ago that, responding to Obama’s call to examine these policies, Gabriel Calzada et al. published their “Study of the effects on employment of public aid to renewable energy sources” [PDF], which detailed the job-killing effects of state investment in inefficient and unreliable power.

You may recall, too, the Obama administration’s sleazy efforts to smear this work. They were attacked here and in Spain by vested interests, Big Green, and the Spanish Communist trade union. Their supposed crime was being unpatriotic — that is, letting the cat out of the bag about the true cost of green-jobs schemes before the U.S. had committed to them and thereby bailed out Spain’s “bubble” industries.

It’s been an eventful week in Spain on the issue, so allow us to gloat.

On Tuesday, the story finally made it onto the front page of Expansión (their equivalent of the Financial Times) — earning coverage by an editorial and two opeds, as well.

The paper’s front page screams: “the cost of renewables skyrockets to 6.2 billion euros” — though that number refers only to the feed-in tariffs of last year alone. (Hey . . . skyrocketing. No wonder Obama cast his longing gaze Spain’s way!)

The title of one article inside is “To subsidize the renewables costs 250 euros [appx. $335] every year in electricity to each consumer.”
The editorial decries “the unsustainable cost of renewables.”

Keep in mind that Expansión had great difficulties in commenting on the Calzada report a year ago, due to the state of the debate and intense political pressure prior to their study.

Further, the president of Gas Natural has decided to attack the renewables scheme directly, as revealed in a Libertad Digital article titled “Gas Natural criticizes the government for investing in renewables that we do not need.” He is quoted as asking, “Are we so rich as to invest in something that we do not need? Do we have so much extra money?”

Calzada informs me that the precipitating event for this outburst of honesty was that, in recent weeks, the government has recognized that electricity costs went up 23 percent last year due to subsidies for solar power. Also helpful was a solar scandal that Calzada described to me a couple of months back but that could not be established as fact at that time: Owners of solar fields had placed oil generators next to their solar fields to simulate more electricity production from the solar panels, for which they were reimbursed at the highly subsidized solar rate.

The scandal was finally uncovered because, after years of conducting this fraud without inspections, the greedy rascals were doing it even at night.
Now, no matter what sort of absurd cheerleading President Obama engages in about Spanish technology — similar to his inanity about windmills being “new technology” (yes, he says that) — I am certain that even Spanish solar panels are not so advanced as to produce electricity at night.

Today there are more developments. According to an e-mail from Calzada, more op-eds and articles are on the way. There are also rumors reported throughout Spanish media that the government is considering a reduction of the subsidy (again) — not only for new installation but also for existing capacity.

As a result, stocks of renewable companies are falling. Here is a report with graphics at Libertad Digital.

So it appears that brave souls like Calzada et al. are winning this battle against the cobardes verde. At least the battle of arguments. The politics . . . well . . . that’ll come.

— Chris Horner is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a best-selling author. His latest book is Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America.

04/21 12:25 PM Share

In Search of a Villain

In SEC v. Goldman Sachs, the government makes Wall Street the fall guy.

By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com/
April 20, 2010 4:00 A.M.

When the Securities and Exchange Commission threw down the gauntlet against Goldman Sachs on Friday, Henry Kissinger’s bon mot on the brutal 1980s war between Iran and Iraq sprang to mind: “Too bad they can’t both lose.”

Succinctly summing up the allegations, SEC enforcement chief Robert Khuzami quipped that the financial “product” at the heart of the suit “was new and complex, but the deception is old and simple.” Khuzami, an old pal and my partner on the Blind Sheikh terrorism prosecution, is smart, tough, and knows the securities laws through and through. To paraphrase the great football coach Bill Parcells: Goldman better bring its lunch, because it’s going to be a long day.

Still, the choice of words is telling: “deception,” not “lie.” The other side of this coin is evident in Goldman’s vigorous denial of wrongdoing. As the Wall Street Journal put it, the company insists “it made the proper disclosure” on the transaction at issue. This case comes down to what the law calls “material omissions”: Goldman claims everything it said about the securities it marketed was true; the SEC counters that Goldman failed to say everything it was obliged to say.

What is the card that Goldman is accused of withholding? It is the fact that the securities in question, a species of collateralized debt obligation (CDO), were designed by hedge-fund magnate John Paulson, who dearly hoped his creation would prove worthless. And he had good reason to believe that it would: CDOs are basically pools of mortgages sold to investors as securities, and Paulson had the smarts to foresee the housing meltdown before it was on the national radar.

In the Age of Obama, Paulson is the perfect villain: the corporate tycoon who is responsible for the whole mess — which the Obama administration would have you believe proximately caused the financial meltdown of 2007–08 — and yet rides away unscathed. Yes, he made a tidy $4 billion when the bubble burst and the mortgage market crashed, but he is not charged in the SEC’s Goldman suit. As Khuzami put it, “Goldman made the representations, Paulson did not.”

So, Democrats chime in on cue, we must have the umpty-umpth regulatory overhaul of the financial system to do what we were promised the last one (Sarbanes-Oxley) would do: perfect disclosure, eliminate risk, and ensure that anyone who makes a profit because he’s better than the rest of us at reading the tea leaves gets his comeuppance. But Paulson did not escape the noose because of a regulatory loophole: He is not charged because it is not a crime to be smart — not yet, anyway.

Paulson figured out that the government had tried to turn the dream of home ownership into a right of home ownership through a series of extortionate devices such as the Clinton-era amendments to the Carter-era Community Reinvestment Act; the Clinton-era crackdown on “redlining,” which saw the government accusing banks of racially invidious practices for failing to make loans to people who couldn’t afford to repay them; and a Bush-era delusion called the American Dream Down Payment Act, which was in fact a down payment on compassionate conservatism’s dream of creating an additional 5.5 million minority homeowners by 2010 — a dream that turns out to have come at a nightmarish cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, and counting.


Each of these initiatives had the effect of pressuring banks into making risky mortgage loans. The government thumb on the scale induced credit raters to abdicate their responsibilities, while private-public chimeras Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac poured fuel on the fire, backing ever more risky loans with an implied guarantee that taxpayers would pony up when, inevitably, the debtors couldn’t.

Paulson assayed the playing field and drew two conclusions: first, that the system was headed for collapse, and, second, that the government was remorselessly committed to the system. So, he paid market-maker Goldman Sachs $15 million to peddle an investment vehicle he fashioned from the riskiest mortgages: not because he thought it would thrive, but because he wanted to bet against it. As Goldman sold these CDOs to investors, Paulson countered by putting his money into credit-default swaps, so he’d be covered when the crash he thought inevitable finally hit. He was right and the CDO investors were wrong, so he made a killing and they lost their shirts. But Paulson didn’t lie to make his killing. He correctly calculated that the system was unsustainable and shorted it. The other guys bet the other way and lost.

So if Paulson is just a smart guy who didn’t do anything wrong in manufacturing the CDOs, why is Goldman in the soup for selling them? In SEC logic, it’s because the seller knew the manufacturer had a dirty mind but didn’t let the buyers in on that detail.

That is absurd. The supposedly duped investors were no babes in the woods. They were highly sophisticated players. Indeed, the specific investment vehicle at issue is not merely a CDO but something even more esoteric: a synthetic CDO. As the Wall Street Journal’s editors explain, this sort of CDO is not actually composed of the risky mortgages themselves, or even of securities derived from the mortgages. Instead, the synthetic CDO (known as “ABACUS 2007-AC1”) was a financial instrument contrived specifically to enable investors to gamble on whether the value of the underlying assets (the risky mortgages) would rise or fall. We’re not talking about a schoolyard pick-up game here — this is the big leagues. The players are pros, and when they play, it is understood that there will be winners and losers.

In this instance, the investors assumed that a government-run gravy train never ends and that there is no day of reckoning. In contrast, Paulson assumed that at some point the piper must always be paid. Paulson, of course, was right.

Unless the SEC has more than what is laid out in its complaint, this isn’t fraud. It’s politics. If you want to talk material omissions, to charge Goldman but not charge Paulson is pretty darn material. If what Goldman was selling was fraudulent, it can only be because what Paulson manufactured for sale was fraudulent. The two were in cahoots. If what Paulson did was perfectly lawful, Goldman can’t be legally culpable for helping him do it.


Paulson is not like a mob bookie who secretly pays the better team to shave points. He’s an analyst who realized that the team everybody was betting on was actually awful. He didn’t do anything to stop them from beating the point spread — he just realized there was no way they could do it. He saw that the government had rigged the rules, treating unqualified borrowers as qualified. He had plenty of skin in the game, and he’d have been the big-time loser if the government had proved able to realize its fantasy of increasing homeownership without increasing mortgage risk. Paulson correctly figured that once the game was actually being played — the game of life in which people’s dreams run up against people’s means — the unqualified borrowers would never get near the goal line.

To extend the metaphor, Goldman just took Paulson’s action, as it was allowed to do — as, indeed, it is its business to do. Goldman and the sophisticated CDO investors wagered that subprime borrowers would meet mortgage obligations that were out of their stars — a belief actively encouraged by the same government that now has Goldman in its crosshairs. They were wrong: Goldman says it lost $90 million on the transaction. That is, knowing everything there was to know about Paulson’s role in structuring the product, Goldman bet with the investors against Paulson. The investors were no more deceived than Goldman itself was. And the deception wasn’t caused by Paulson (which the SEC implicitly admits by not charging him). It was caused by the delusion that government could forever suspend the laws of economics.

The statists who gave us the financial meltdown are making a wager more insidious than anything Paulson or Goldman ever came up with. They are betting that Americans will be duped into believing that something other than pandering — something other than the government’s scheme to use taxpayers’ dollars to purchase the loyalty of low-income and minority voters — is responsible for our current straits. Obama & Co. are constructing a narrative that says a near-depression was triggered by greedy Wall Street predators who dragged investors under water. If you buy that, they get a double boon: They escape blame, and they bolster their campaign to grab more control of the private sector under the guise of “regulation.”

Don’t buy it.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad (Encounter Books, 2008).

Yes, Everyone Really Does Hate Performance Reviews

by Samuel A. Culbert
Monday, April 19, 2010
provided by The Wall Street Journal
http://finance.yahoo.com/


It's time to finally put the performance review out of its misery.

This corporate sham is one of the most insidious, most damaging, and yet most ubiquitous of corporate activities. Everybody does it, and almost everyone who's evaluated hates it. It's a pretentious, bogus practice that produces absolutely nothing that any thinking executive should call a corporate plus.

And yet few people do anything to kill it. Well, it's time they did.

Don't get me wrong: Reviewing performance is good; it should happen every day. But employees need evaluations they can believe, not the fraudulent ones they receive. They need evaluations that are dictated by need, not a date on the calendar. They need evaluations that make them strive to improve, not pretend they are perfect.

Who, Me?

Sadly, most managers are oblivious to the havoc they wreak with performance reviews. To some extent, they don't know any better: This is how performance reviews have been done, and this is how they will be done. Period.

Here's a simple experiment you can try. Ask yourself: How often have you heard a manager say, "Here is what I believe," followed by, "Now tell me, what do you think?" and actually mean it? Rarely, I bet.

The performance review is the primary tool for reinforcing this sorry state. Performance reviews instill feelings of being dominated. They send employees the message that the boss's opinion of their performance is the key determinant of pay, assignment, and career progress. And while that opinion pretends to be objective, it is no such thing. Think about it: If performance reviews are so objective, why is it that so many people get totally different ratings simply by switching bosses?

No, instead, the overriding message is that the boss's assessment is really about whether the boss "likes" you, whether he or she feels "comfortable" with you. None of this is good for the company unless the boss is some kind of savant genius who can read an employee's talents with laser accuracy -- and then understands what motivates the employee so perfectly that he or she can push just the right psychological buttons to get the employee to use those talents.

Unlikely and even more unlikely.

The Damage Done

At this point, you may be asking: So what? So what if you can't speak your mind to your boss? So what if the performance review forces the boss to focus on an employee's "weaknesses" (since most bosses are told they can't give everyone top grades)? What harm does it really do?

Sadly, it does enormous damage. Forget, for a minute, the damage it does on a personal level -- the way it makes work lives miserable, the way it leaves employees feeling depressed and anxious, the way having to show so much tolerance at work leaves them with too little tolerance at home. Just think about what it does on a corporate level, the enormous amount of time and energy it wastes, and the way it prevents companies from tapping the innovative, outside-the-box thinking that so many employees are capable of. If only, that is, they weren't so afraid.

A Better Way

The good news is that none of this is the way things have to be. The one-sided, boss-dominated performance review needs to be replaced by a straight-talking relationship where the focus is on results, not personality, and where the boss is held accountable for the success of the subordinate (instead of just using the performance review to blame the subordinate for any problems they're having).

In this new system, managers will stop labeling people "good guys" and "bad guys" -- or, in the sick parlance of performance reviews, outstanding performers, average performers, and poor performers to be put on notice. Instead, they'll get it straight that their job is to make everyone reporting to them good guys.

If you're a boss, and your subordinate isn't succeeding, something is broken here. Doing more of the same isn't going to cut it. It's now time for you to ask, "What do you need from me to deliver what we are both on the firing line to produce?" And just as important, it's time for you to listen to the answer.

Asking and listening. Imagine that. It's called a conversation, and it's a rarity in workplaces today. Only by hearing what the other person thinks, and putting that person's actions in the appropriate context, can you actually see what the person is saying and doing -- and how together you can get where the company needs you to go.

Performance reviews won't get you there, because that's just about the boss getting the subordinate to buy into his or her way of thinking. It's a mirror -- not a window into the other person. But take away the performance review and you might actually have straight talk.

Rotten Milk

Proponents of performance reviews say that the problem isn't the review itself, but poorly trained reviewers. Sorry, but that doesn't fly: The performance review done exactly as intentioned is just as horribly flawed as the review done "poorly." You can't bake a great cake with rotten milk, no matter how skilled the chef. They also say you need performance reviews to protect against lawsuits by laid-off workers. Nonsense: Most performance reviews hurt a company's case because they aren't honest assessments of a worker's performance.

Also, before you start griping about how I don't understand Margaret, the woman in your department who wants to do as little work as possible, or how Tom is so distracted by his life outside the office that he can't get anything done at work, let me stop you and say: I know that not everybody deserves to stay in their jobs. Getting rid of performance reviews doesn't get rid of slackers. Not everybody will leap at the chance to get better and grow.

But everybody deserves the best shot managers can give them. And they can't get that shot with performance reviews.

Obama's Affordable Energy Policy: Safe, Legal and Rare

by Christopher C. Horner
http://www.humanevents.com/
04/19/2010

Undermining access to abundant conventional energy sources has proved to be a key component of Barack Obama's promised "fundamental transformation" of America. To be fair, he was uniquely candid when vowing that "under my plan of a cap-and-trade system electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket." This interview received limited coverage despite also revealing plans to "bankrupt" politically disfavored industry while also raising “billions of dollars."

Now, as the Senate prepares to debate the latest mislabeled "comprehensive energy legislation," and amid the unfolding revolt over the realities of this fundamental transformation, such radical propositions warrant revisiting.

Modern environmentalism of the sort reflected in Obama's rhetoric and policies is staunchly anti-energy. It seeks to use the state to create scarcity as a means of imposing the environmentalists' will on your lives. Congress, smarting from the 1993 "BTU" tax debacle that even Al Gore says led to Democrats losing control of Congress, is reluctant to vote on transparent energy tax hikes. So the desired scarcity is created instead by the opaque "cap-and-trade".


This scheme is undergoing its fourth Senate incarnation in seven years, driven by a classic if collapsing "Bootlegger and Baptist" coalition among rent-seeking industry and green pressure groups. Last June, they managed to drag the (immediately doomed) House version of the scheme over the finish line on a close vote that will cost lawmaker jobs just as surely as BTU did.

The House bill's requirement of energy use "allowances"—uncomfortably close to World War II-style ration coupons—was economy-wide. Although styled as "market-based," the market for the politically allocated allowances only began with a secondary market of those operations whose growth, or less formidable lobbying budgets, left them wanting.

To Obama's credit, his preferred approach sold all of the ration coupons ab initio, raising the promised billions immediately. Doling out free ice cream proved irresistible to the House Democrat leadership, however, who delayed the revenue gusher for a decade or so.

But no matter how the scheme is designed, energy and other costs will rise, harming competitiveness, chasing jobs and growth offshore and hurting lower income house-holds worst. So on the advice of Democrat pollsters like Stanley Greenberg, the energy-scarcity regime is now sold as a "jobs" program. As, it seems, is every measure presently before Congress, with equal plausibility.

The lure of "green jobs" is undeniable. But this jobs program uniquely included two years of relief for workers displaced by the mandates. If Europe's experience is any indicator, and it certainly should be, then those jobs lost will be many. Ask the 175 steelworkers added in 2005 by Acerinox—known here as North American Stainless—as a direct result of Europe's "green jobs" mandates and in anticipation of its cap-and-trade plan.

Lawmakers wave off such evidence airily claiming they will simply avoid Europe's debacle.
Further, the European "clean energy" and "green jobs" models Mr. Obama cites—Spain, Germany and Denmark—have proven to be expensive drains, harmful to competitiveness while creating artificial "bubbles" that can only be sustained by growing the public subsidies.

Likewise, the supposed green boom in China is not evidence of their "eating our lunch" as we are told, or their having finally defeated the laws of physics. Instead, China's windmill craze is purely the result of Western mandates, such as the Kyoto "Clean Development Mechanism" giving companies credit for installing windmills there instead of even more costly experiments in trying to reduce emissions at home.

No, this agenda is not about jobs and not about "the climate." It is about power and "organizing society," no matter that we are just as reluctant as the weather to succumb to the gentle ministrations of Washington bureaucrats. So the policy brickbats have come out.

If you winced at the Obama Administration's refusal to release water to California farmers in the name of a fish—at least, until two congressmen whose constituents were affected agreed to vote for the healthcare bill—then avert your gaze from Obama's war on Appalachian coal being waged in the name of a bug (the Mayfly).

Obama's immediate moves to discourage domestic energy production (and consumption) include withdrawing massive tracts of public lands from energy exploration, leasing the fewest acres in any year on record, and seeking to lock up tens of thousands more despite a 2003 agreement to stop designating lands as wilderness as a means to shut them off from resource production.

Both of Obama's budgets proposed tens of billions in new taxes on oil and gas producers—with his Treasury department explaining to Congress that our tax code "encourages overproduction of oil and gas." This was not the public's impression, and they successfully demanded removal of moratoria on offshore and some onshore hydrocarbon energy production.

That one encouraging step forward was reversed almost in its entirety by Obama's recent move oddly styled as "opening up" certain areas of the Outer Continental Shelf while actually closing the vast majority to energy production.

Obama's support for loan guarantees for two new nuclear reactors was similarly aimed at drumming up support from soft Republicans for the expected Senate "energy" fight.

Though spun by his aides as meeting Republicans halfway, it actually goes just 2% of the way toward satisfying his own economic assumptions. That is, to tame the projected costs of cap-and-trade, he assumed 100 new nuclear reactors.

Most menacing of all, the administration began regulating carbon dioxide from motor vehicles—thereby triggering an economy-wide regulatory cascade, down even to the retail store level and with even EPA projecting "absurd results”—claiming the Supreme Court mandated it. Of course, the Court in Massachusetts v. EPA did no such thing, but merely gave EPA this authority. Obama is running with it, while typically pointing the finger of blame at others.

Obama's power grab is not about the climate, or jobs, but about your freedoms which a certain class can no longer tolerate. Controlling access to energy is one sure way to organize things, and that is what President Obama seeks to do, sooner rather than later.

We can't say we weren't warned.

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

So now, it’s no business of the state

Funny that the ‘Toronto Star’ writer had the opposite view when it came to my columns

by Mark Steyn on Thursday, April 15, 2010 9:00am - 196 Comments
http://www2.macleans.ca/

Photograph by Rebecca Cook/Reuters

Quebec’s move to nix the niqab continues to tie Canada’s commentariat in knots. The funniest column to date was by Haroon Siddiqui, “editorial page editor emeritus” of the Toronto Star. Mr. Siddiqui was not impressed by the arguments mounted against the head-to-toe body bag—for example, the notion that it is a “symbol of oppression”:

“Let’s assume that it is,” he wrote. “Whose business is it to end the practice—that of the state?”

That’s pretty cute coming from a guy who, during this magazine’s long battle with Canada’s “human rights” commissions, argued at length that it was most certainly the business of the state to end the practice of Maclean’s carrying Islamophobic Steyn columns. If the state can regulate what you write and say and think and even (as in the lesbian heckler case at the British Columbia Tribunal) what you quip, it can most certainly regulate what you wear. In Canada, it would be quicker to list what isn’t the business of the state. “The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation,” said Pierre Trudeau, unless, of course, you’re tucked up with a nice mug of cocoa reading an Islamophobic edition of Maclean’s. It was a classic bit of Trudeaupian legerdemain: if you’re allowed to roger anything that moves, or doesn’t, according to taste, you won’t notice all the other parts of your life the state has a place in. In Canada, it’s the state’s business when you get your hip operation, not yours: if the state has jurisdiction over your hip, why shouldn’t it also have jurisdiction over which garments the hip can be sheathed in? In Canada, a resident alien is not permitted to own a bookstore, on grounds of cultural protection. If “cultural protection” can prohibit a homosexual from San Francisco opening up a gay bookstore in Vancouver, why can’t it also extend to a Muslim woman’s dress?


And Quebec is Canada without even the residual restraints of the Britannic inheritance. In the interests of la collectivité, the province regulates not only the public usage of language but the very size of lettering in which your words can be displayed. If the state has power to set a maximum font on the ladies’ room door, why can’t it also set a limit on the yards of cloth you have to hoist up once you get in there?

Until Jean Charest decided to take the crimping shears to the niqab, Mr. Siddiqui had never met a statist initiative he wasn’t hot for. But statism is never about principle, only about power. Tyranny is always whimsical. If you’re an unemployed loser living in his parents’ basement in Dead Moose Junction and you put up a blog post saying Jews are vermin who should be kicked out of Canada, the Dominion’s heroic “human rights” champion Richard Warman will haul you up before the state commissars and destroy your life. But, if you’re Salman Hossain, alumnus of the universities of both Toronto and York, and you call Jews the “scum of the earth” and argue that “a genocide should be perpetrated against the Jewish populations of North America and Europe,” the valiant Prince Richard and the knights of the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission’s round table are curiously reluctant to saddle up. If you’re the genial young lads caught on tape outside Palestine House in Mississauga the other day taunting Jews with threats of another Holocaust, not only does the Canadian state turn a blind eye, it actively subsidizes this genial contribution to “diversity” with your tax dollars.

Statism is muscle. In Trudeaupia, that muscle has usually been applied against the political right. During the Ann Coulter fiasco a week or two back, Michael Lefive wrote to explain to me that I had a defective understanding of Canadian “freedom”:

“I find it interesting how freedom of expression is so poorly understood. I feel just as free saying you do not know what you are talking about as I would saying you’re an ignorant f–k.

“The question revolves around simple civility and the freedom of expression provided by a language’s potential for alternatives. I have lived in both Canada and the U.S., and the Canadian approach revolves around civility and inclusion of human differences while providing as broad an arena for opinion as I have found in the U.S.

“Canadians freely expressed themselves. Ann Coulter is not welcomed. That IS freedom of expression! Hate-mongers need not apply.”

Putting aside the fact that the only fellow using the words “ignorant f–k” is the guy bragging about his “civility and inclusion of human differences,” note what M. Lefive’s “simple civility” boils down to—labelling me and Miss Coulter as “hate-mongers” who “do not know what you are talking about.” Gee, with that kind of simple civility, why don’t we just cut to the bar fight? Likewise, Haroon Siddiqui airily attributes the anti-niqab campaign to “an unholy alliance of leftist feminists, right-wing bigots and Quebec nationalists.” “Bigots,” huh? Even in an unholy alliance, some allies are less legiti­mate than others. Mr. Siddiqui’s friends in public universities, in state media, in government agencies, in taxpayer-funded agitprop groups and the rest of bien pensant Canada have no problem labelling people as beyond the pale. Siddiqui’s mistake was in assuming he and the state would always see eye to eye about whom it was okay to revile.

Floundering for an argument, he demands to know why, if the rationale is the secular nature of Quebec society, the government doesn’t also defund the Jewish General Hospital and tear down the crucifix at the national assembly. Oh, c’mon, is that the best you can do? That’s like saying, if Chief Commissar Jennifer Lynch’s rationale for the CHRC’s censorship powers is that history shows us powerful words can lead to dark deeds, why does she go after basement Nazis but not the tenured Marxists at every Canadian university in the name of whose political creed untold millions have died?

Why? Because, like I say, statism is arbitrary.

Perhaps Haroon Siddiqui will have better luck waging his campaign against state power than I’ve had with mine. He, after all, is not a “right-wing bigot,” but an exemplary pillar of the Canadian establishment. Why, I see he is a Member of the Order of Canada, which is not something I’m in any danger of this side of an alternative universe. Yet, even so, I would doubt he can win this one.

Almost as hilarious as English Canada’s anguished columnists, Lucien Bouchard cautions the Parti Québécois not to get mixed up with “identity politics.” What a card! Identity politics is, of course, the PQ’s raison d’être. Quebec nationalism came into being to protect Quebec’s “cultural identity.” Once upon a time, that didn’t need explaining: “La langue est gardienne de la foi,” Henri Bourassa said a century ago. The French language protects the Catholic faith. But the faith is long gone, and the churches are empty, and Quebec’s shrivelled, post-Catholic fertility rate combined with a constitutionally dubious, provincially controlled immigration policy has resulted in a recently arrived and ever swelling population from “French” (please, no tittering) North Africa and the Middle East.

Is that all that’s left of Quebec’s “cultural identity”? The lingo? Or to put it another way: suppose, in a few years’ time, the last elderly Anglos who still refer to Trois-Rivières as “Three Rivers” have died off and instead the streets of the province’s cities are clogged with niqab-clad francophones. Would Quebec feel it had won its battle to preserve its “cultural identity”?

Obviously not. Which is why 95 per cent of Quebecers favour the government’s niqab ban. Even in the ROC, support is running at about 80 per cent. Most of the social engineering and the remorseless dismantling of pre-Trudeaupian Canada takes place incrementally, under cover of darkness. The noxious brainwashing of our youth at Canadian universities is mostly concerned with theoreticals and abstractions. But the niqab and the burka are not abstract: they’re the starkest emblem of the gulf between one culture and another, and when they’re shuffling toward you down the sidewalk they’re telling you something about where your society’s headed. In that sense, they’re the most provocatively absurd of multiculturalism’s fatuities. Naema Ahmed’s lack of a face is, paradoxically, in your face—in a way that many of the multiculti delusions never quite are. It is also a reminder of our likely fate—that Western civilization will not be succeeded by a rainbow-hued utopia but by fractious and mutually hostile barbarisms.

At a certain level, the niqab wars are pathetic. They’re proxy battles for the real issues—on immigration, assimilation, and much else. But the niqab is blazingly vivid in a way that the big abstract nouns aren’t. And, whatever anglophone progressives may think, Jean Charest’s heavy-handed opportunism is in the grand tradition of Canadian statism.

Tags: Haroon Siddiqui, Mark Steyn, niqab, Quebec

Film Review: 'The Manchurian Candidate'

Steyn on Stage and Screen

By Mark Steyn
http://www.marksteyn.com/
Friday, 16 April 2010

If you're in the United Kingdom this weekend, don't miss your chance to see The Manchurian Candidate on the big screen - in London, Glasgow, Belfast, couple of other places. If you're not in Britain, get it on DVD and treat yourself:

Frank Sinatra was frustrated by film. Making music, he was a true collaborator: he enjoyed pitching in on arrangements and orchestrations, and liked the give and take of a recording session. But, in film, collaboration means leaving your reputation in the hands of directors, editors, producers, marketing men and studio heads whose ratchet of small betrayals begins long after the film's wrapped and you're a thousand miles away. It's no coincidence that Sinatra's most satisfying screen work comes in films that he initiated and presided over: Suddenly (1954), a taut little thriller in which he gives the most intense performance of his career as a presidential assassin; and The Manchurian Candidate (1962), a Cold War classic with Frank as a nightmare-haunted veteran. On both occasions, Sinatra invests his roles with the care he gives to a performance of 'Angel Eyes' or 'I've Got You Under My Skin'.

To direct the screen version of Richard Condon's novel, Sinatra turned to John Frankenheimer. Just to give you a sense of a now all but forgotten career, that year Frankenheimer directed All Fall Down, a steamy Southern melodrama with delicate bloom Eva-Marie Saint and slouchy punk Warren Beatty; The Birdman Of Alcatraz, with Burt Lancaster; and then rounded things out with The Manchurian Candidate. So what do you have to show for 1962? Those 12 months from Frankenheimer are better than half a century from most directors. Still The Manchurian Candidate is special, the all-time great conspiracy thriller. The plot is simple enough: It's presidential campaign season in America, but a foreign power has found a distinctive way of arranging events to its own satisfaction.

Doesn't sound much when you put it like that, but the finished film occupies a category all of its own in Frank Sinatra's career, and Laurence Harvey's, and Angela Lansbury's. The second-rank casting is perfect, too: James Gregory as blowhard Senator Iselin, John McGiver as his political opponent, Leslie Parrish as the all-American blonde who saves Harvey from a fatal snakebite and as a bonus removes her blouse to bandage the wound.

The detail is hugely enjoyable: Sinatra's platoon is sitting slumped and bored on a row of chairs in an hotel lobby, listening to a visiting speaker give a talk on hydrangeas to a ladies' luncheon club; as she speaks, Frankenheimer's camera rotates slowly round the room past the genteel spinsters and widows in hats and gloves and then begins a second circle, and we realise the women are really Communist scientists, and the palm court is really a laboratory, and the platoon has been brainwashed.

Because of its theme - a conspiracy to kill a presidential candidate - and then because of a dispute over the bookkeeping, Sinatra pulled it from release after Kennedy's assassination and kept it out of view for a quarter-century, until 1987 when those of us who'd never seen it had to agree that everything we'd heard about it was true. Watching it now, you're aware of how the political dynamic has changed in Hollywood. As United Artists boasted on the inititial home-video release, Candidate was one of the first films 'to attack the political witchhunts of the McCarthy era'. But it attacks them from a very particular perspective: it says the fever of the McCarthyite years helped discredit the cause of anti-Communism and thus enabled the Reds to pursue their agenda in the shadows unimpeded. That's a subtler argument than most of the dreary anti-McCarthy films since have managed to make, and one closer to the truth.

There's a great scene in which the pliant boob Iselin is demanding of his sinister wife (Lansbury) to be given a definitive number on just how many Commies are supposed to be working in the Department of Defense: she keeps feeding him inconsistent figures and he gets the feeling he's becoming a laughing-stock; bored and contemptuous, she looks at him thumping the Heinz bottle over his breakfast and tells him there are 57. He believes her.

And yet Candidate also has one of the best strangers-on-a-train scenes, after North By Northwest. Sinatra's a wreck - sweating, twitching, shaking so much he can't light his cigarette. So a perfect stranger, Janet Leigh, pulls out one of hers, lights up and gives it to him. 'Maryland's a beautiful state, ' she says. 'This is Delaware, ' he replies. (Even in his breakdown, he's very factual.) 'I know, ' she says. 'I was one of the original Chinese workmen who laid the track on this stretch. But, um, nevertheless, Maryland is a beautiful state.'

It's weird: a Hollywood meet-cute that, in the context of the film, sounds just as odd as any secret Red code, especially the Chinese bit. Very few directors could have made this cast mesh, but Frankenheimer pulls it off: Lansbury was only a couple of years older than Harvey, yet you never doubt for a moment she's his mother, and her final harrowing smothering scenes are like a political version of Gypsy. Amazing. Even more unlikely is the idea of Harvey and Sinatra in a movie together - as actors, they seem barely to belong in the same universe. Yet the casting works, brilliantly.

Forty years later, it was all more ordinary. The 2004 version stars Denzel Washington, Liev Schrieber, Meryl Streep - all fine actors with nothing to play. There's barely a candidate, and no Manchurians - just the usual sinister megacorp. To be sure, if you were remaking the Condon novel or Sinatra film today, you'd do it differently: For one thing, we brainwash ourselves; who needs the Chinese? But the remake's failure goes beyond that to remind you of a very basic truth: Hollywood doesn't even understand its own successes.

How Clinton exploited Oklahoma City for political gain

By: Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
The Washington Examiner
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/
April 18, 2010

With the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing Monday, former President Bill Clinton is playing a starring role in the liberal effort to draw what the New York Times calls "parallels between the antigovernment tone that preceded that devastating attack and the political tumult of today." The short version of the narrative is: Today's Tea Partiers are tomorrow's right-wing bombers.

Former President Bill Clinton (AP Photo/Ben Margot, File) (AP)

On Friday, Clinton spoke at a symposium on the bombing organized by the liberal think tank Center for American Progress, founded and run by John Podesta, the former Clinton White House chief of staff who also directed the Obama transition. The theme of Clinton's remarks was that movements like the Tea Party, characterized by extreme right-wing rhetoric, could lead to political violence. In the last few days, news accounts in the Times ("Recalling '95 Bombing, Clinton Sees Parallels"), Newsweek ("Hate: Antigovernment extremists are on the rise -- and on the march"), and ABC News ("Watch your words") drove home Clinton's point. "This is a legitimate thing to do," the former president said, "drawing parallels to the time running up to Oklahoma City and a lot of the political discord that exists in our country today."

What Clinton and his supporters do not talk about is the way in which Clinton, aided by pollster/adviser Dick Morris, exploited the bombing to make a political comeback from what was the lowest point in Clinton's presidency to that time. (The Lewinsky scandal was still three years in the future.) In the days after Oklahoma City, Clinton and Morris devised a plan to use the bombing to discredit and outmaneuver the new Republican majority in Congress.

Clinton was in deep political trouble in April 1995. Six months earlier, voters had resoundingly rejected Democrats in the 1994 mid-term elections, giving the GOP control of both House and Senate. Polls showed the public viewed Clinton as weak, incompetent and ineffective. House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his GOP forces seized the initiative on virtually every significant issue, while Clinton appeared to be politically dead. The worst moment may have come on April 18, the day before the bombing, when Clinton plaintively told reporters, "The president is still relevant here."

And then came the explosion at the Murrah Federal Building. In addition to seeing a criminal act and human loss, Clinton and Morris saw opportunity. If the White House could tie Gingrich, congressional Republicans and conservative voices like Rush Limbaugh to the attack, then Clinton might gain the edge in the fight against the GOP.

Morris began polling about Oklahoma City almost immediately after the bombing. On April 23, four days after the attack, Clinton appeared to point the finger straight at his political opponents during a speech in Minneapolis. "We hear so many loud and angry voices in America today whose sole goal seems to be to try to keep some people as paranoid as possible and the rest of us all torn up and upset with each other," he said. "They spread hate. They leave the impression that, by their very words, that violence is acceptable."

At a White House meeting four days later, on April 27, Morris presented Clinton with a comeback strategy based on his polling. Morris prepared an extensive agenda for the session, a copy of which he would include in the paperback version of his 1999 memoir, Behind the Oval Office. This is how the April 27 agenda began:

AFTERMATH OF OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBING

A. Temporary gain: boost in ratings -- here today, gone tomorrow

B. More permanent gain: Improvements in character/personality attributes -- remedies weakness, incompetence, ineffectiveness found in recent poll

C. Permanent possible gain: sets up Extremist Issue vs. Republicans

Later, under the heading "How to use extremism as issue against Republicans," Morris told Clinton that "direct accusations" of extremism wouldn't work because the Republicans were not, in fact, extremists.
Rather, Morris recommended what he called the "ricochet theory." Clinton would "stimulate national concern over extremism and terror," and then, "when issue is at top of national agenda, suspicion naturally gravitates to Republicans." As that happened, Morris recommended, Clinton would use his executive authority to impose "intrusive" measures against so-called extremist groups. Clinton would explain that such intrusive measures were necessary to prevent future violence, knowing that his actions would, Morris wrote, "provoke outrage by extremist groups who will write their local Republican congressmen." Then, if members of Congress complained, that would "link right-wing of the party to extremist groups." The net effect, Morris concluded, would be "self-inflicted linkage between [GOP] and extremists."

Clinton's proposals -- for example, new limits on firearms and some explosives that were opposed by the National Rifle Association -- had "an underlying political purpose," Morris wrote in 2004 in another book about Clinton, Because He Could. That purpose was "to lead voters to identify the Oklahoma City bombing with the right wing. By making proposals we knew the Republicans would reject…we could label them as soft on terror an imply a connection with the extremism of the fanatics who bombed the Murrah Federal Building."

It was a political strategy crafted while rescue and recovery efforts were still underway in Oklahoma City. And it worked better than Clinton or Morris could have predicted. In the months after the bombing, Clinton regained the upper hand over Republicans, eventually winning battles over issues far removed from the attack. The next year, 1996, he went on to re-election. None of that might have happened had Clinton, along with Morris, not found a way to wring as much political advantage as possible out of the deaths in Oklahoma City. And that is the story you're not hearing in all the anniversary discussions.

LaHood Gives the Green Light

The Obama Watch

By Matt Purple on 4.19.10 @ 6:08AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/

At a National Press Club event last year, a panel moderator decided to quiz Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood (pictured below) on his department's policy. "Some in the highway-supporters motorist groups have been concerned by your livability initiative," he said. "Is this an effort to make driving more torturous and to coerce people out of their cars?"

"It is a way to coerce people out of their cars," answered LaHood, with a blunt frankness rare for a politician.

These days, the Department of Transportation is sticking its nose into everyone's lives. DOT has teamed up with the Environmental Protection Agency and Housing and Urban Development to create the Partnership for Sustainable Communities. Their actual purpose is somewhat foggy and loaded with Orwellian language -- something about creating more "livable" and "healthy" environments. As transportation goes, that means creating more "choices" for commuters: the choice to leave your car at home and take the train, for example. Or ride your bike. Or walk.

It's an alarming fact that's eluded even many conservative commentators: The core of the president's progressive agenda is to fundamentally change in the way we move from one point to another.

American transportation is dominated by the car. According to a USA Today study, 91% of Americans drive to work. Another study by Experian Automotive found that an American household has an average of 2.28 cars in the garage. That's a dire crisis for a president who thinks the entire economy should "go green." With cap-and-trade having gone rigor mortis in Congress, the Obama Administration needed easier ways to create serious environmental change.

Enter the Department of Transportation. Prior to the Obama presidency, the DOT was of relatively small importance, spending its time enforcing obscure railroad regulations and trying to get people to buckle up. The department gained some attention during the Bush Administration after airline screeners were nationalized under its authority, but it still took a backseat to most other cabinet-level federal agencies.

But with the Obama agenda in full swing, the DOT has come front and center. Joe Biden even called Secretary LaHood "the star of the Cabinet." Much of this attention is thanks to LaHood's fiery crusades against Toyota, but that's not the whole picture. Obama wants a major shift in transportation policy and LaHood is overseeing it.

As LaHood wrote not long ago, "Today, I want to announce a sea change. People across America who value bicycling should have a voice when it comes to transportation planning. This is the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized."

Perhaps LaHood's most important responsibility so far has been the awarding of $1.5 billion in Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grants. Recipients were supposed to be transportation projects that "will have a significant impact on the Nation, a metropolitan area or a region." But many of LaHood's choices seemed like sepia-toned throwbacks to the Industrial Era. One was a $23 million grant for a bike path through Philadelphia and southern New Jersey. Many more went to rail projects. Others were aimed at green bugaboos and had little to do with transportation at all. One $22.3 million grant went to a business park in Rhode Island that's home to several wind power companies.

Fourteen of the TIGER grants were spent on projects that were "multimodal" -- a new buzz word in the Obama age referring to multiple modes of transportation. In Obama's America, seen through a dreamy progressive lens, just as many people travel on trains and bicycles as in cars. At least LaHood, who bikes on the weekends, is leading by example.

Another product of the DOT-EPA collaboration was the recent clampdown in mileage standards. Under the new rules, car companies must have a fleet average of 35.5 miles a gallon by 2016 -- up from an average 27.5 miles per gallon today. It's a massive increase with a short amount of time for car companies to comply. Automakers' only real solution is to put popular truck and SUV models -- like the 14 mpg Ford F-150 -- on the chopping block and invest more in hybrid cars.

Previously, these regulations have been run through Congress. But after a Supreme Court ruling gave the executive branch unilateral authority to enforce the Clean Air Act, the EPA and DOT can pretty much do whatever they want.

One of LaHood's allies in Congress, Rep. James Oberstar, has introduced a bill that would essentially federalize the nation's entire transportation network. Called the Surface Transportation Authorization Act of 2009, the legislation frets that states have "great discretion to shift [federal transportation] funds between programs" and bemoans the "lack of clear Federal priorities and system-wide objectives" for transportation. In other words, grey-suited managers in Washington don't have enough power to dictate transportation projects.

To solve this problem, the bill has the federal government gobbling up transportation power from the states and forcing them to meet certain benchmarks. States are essentially coerced to make sure their transportation networks are environmentally friendly and include plenty of rail lines and buses. How bad is it? The bill actually requires the DOT to create an U.S. Bicycle Route System similar to our interstate highways. Yes, the progressive Oberstar actually imagines a day when so many people will travel by bicycle that we'll need transcontinental bike paths. I believe there's a word for that: "China".

The Heritage Foundation's Ronald Utt concludes that the STAA would "shift substantial numbers of passengers from cars to public transit and nonmotorized forms of transportation." The entire bill would cost an estimated $500 billion over six years, which would require a 112% increase in the federal gas tax.

Of that $500 billion, $50 billion is allotted for the development of America's very own high-speed rail network. Currently the Acela line in the northeast is the only HSR in the whole country, and for good reason. As Utt points out, high-speed rail is one of the most expensive and least effective methods of transportation ever devised. The DOT's own inspector general has estimated that reducing travel time between New York City and Boston via Acela by 30 minutes cost the government $14 billion, while reducing car usage by less than one percent.

This is the vision of the Obama Administration: shifting from the all-American car to glorified 19th-century technology. One Republican congressman informed of LaHood's cycling priorities recently wondered if the DOT head was on drugs. It almost seems too absurd to digest.

Then again, when your whole worldview is shaped by the eschatology of a world hurtling towards an environmental apocalypse, suddenly reversion and coercion make sense.


Matt Purple is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.

Why America needs nuclear plants

By George F. Will
From the April 19 issue of Newsweek.
http://www.newsweek.com/

The 25 people killed this month in the West Virginia coal-mine explosion will soon be as forgotten by the nation as are the 362 miners who were killed in a 1907 explosion in that state, the worst mining disaster in American history. The costs of producing the coal that generates approximately half of America's electricity also include the hundreds of other miners who have suffered violent death in that dangerous profession, not to mention those who have suffered debilitating illnesses and premature death from ailments acquired toiling underground.


AFP/Getty Images

Boondoggle: Wind turbines in California.

Which makes particularly pertinent the fact that the number of Americans killed by accidents in 55 years of generating electricity by nuclear power is: zero.

America's 250-year supply of coal will be an important energy source. But even people not much worried about the supposed climate damage done by carbon emissions should see the wisdom -- cheaper electricity, less dependence on foreign sources of energy -- of Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander's campaign to commit the country to building 100 more nuclear-power plants in 20 years.

Today, 20 percent of America's electricity, and 69 percent of its carbon-free generation of electricity, is from nuclear plants. But it has been 30 years since America began construction on a new nuclear reactor.

France gets 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power; China is starting construction of a reactor every three months. Meanwhile, America, which pioneered nuclear power, is squandering money on wind power, which provides 1.3 percent of US electricity: It's slurping up $30 billion of tax breaks and other subsidies amounting to $18.82 per megawatt-hour, 25 times as much per megawatt-hour as the combined subsidies for all other forms of electricity production.

Wind power involves gargantuan "energy sprawl." To produce 20 percent of America's power by wind, which the Obama administration dreamily proposes, would require 186,000 tall turbines -- 40 stories tall, their flashing lights can be seen for 20 miles -- covering an area the size of West Virginia.

The amount of electricity that would be produced by wind turbines extending the entire 2,178 miles of the Appalachian Trail can be produced by four reactors occupying four square miles of land. Birds beware: The American Bird Conservancy estimates that the existing 25,000 turbines kill between 75,000 and 275,000 birds a year. Imagine the toll of 186,000 turbines.

Solar power? It produces less than a tenth of a percent of our electricity. Panels and mirrors mean more sprawl. Biomass? It is not so green when you factor in trucks to haul the stuff to the plants that burn it.

Meanwhile, demand for electricity soars. Five percent of America's electricity powers gadgets no one had 30 years ago -- computers.

America's nuclear industry was a casualty of the 1979 meltdown of the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania, which was and is referred to as a "catastrophe" even though there were no measurable health effects. Chernobyl was a disaster because Russians built the reactor in a way no one builds today -- without a containment vessel.

Since the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, Alexander's state has played a special role in US energy policy. The last commercial reactor opened in America is Watts Bar, Unit 1 in Tennessee. And, in a sense, all uses of nuclear power began in that state.

In September 1942, the federal government purchased 59,000 acres of wilderness in eastern Tennessee and built an instant city -- streets, housing, schools, shops and the world's most sophisticated scientific facilities. This was -- is -- Oak Ridge. Just 34 months later, a blinding flash illuminating the New Mexico desert announced the dawn of the atomic age.

That is what Americans can do when motivated.

Today, a mini-Manhattan Project could find ways to recycle used nuclear fuel in a way that reduces its mass 97 percent and radioactive lifetime 98 percent. Today, Alexander says, 10 percent of America's lightbulbs are lit with electricity generated by nuclear material recycled from old Soviet weapons stocks. This is, as he says, "one of the greatest swords-into-plowshares efforts in world history, although few people seem to know about it."

It is a travesty that the nation that first harnessed nuclear energy has neglected it so long because of fads about supposed "green energy" and superstitions about nuclear power's dangers.

Americans Are More Skeptical of Washington Than Ever

A desire for smaller government is especially evident since Barack Obama took office.

By ANDREW KOHUT
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/public/page/news-opinion-commentary.html
April 19, 2010

By almost every conceivable measure, Americans are less positive and more critical of their government these days. There is a perfect storm of conditions associated with distrust of government—a dismal economy, an unhappy public, and epic discontent with Congress and elected officials.

These are among the principal findings from a new series of Pew Research Center surveys. Rather than an activist government to deal with the nation's top problems, these surveys show that the general public now wants government reformed and a growing number want its power curtailed. With the exception of greater regulation of Wall Street, there is less of an appetite for government solutions to the nation's problems—including greater government control over the economy—than there was when Barack Obama first took office.

The public's hostility toward government seems likely to be an important election issue favoring the Republicans this fall. But the Democrats can take some solace in the fact that neither party can be confident it has the advantage among such a disillusioned electorate. Favorable ratings for both major parties, as well as for Congress, have reached record lows. Opposition to congressional incumbents, already approaching an all-time high, continues to climb.

The tea party movement, which has a small but fervent antigovernment constituency, could be a wild card in this election. On the one hand, its sympathizers are highly energized and inclined to vote Republican. On the other, many Republicans (28%), and Independents who lean Republican (30%), say the "tea party" represents their point of view better than the GOP.


Associated Press

Over the course of the past decade we've seen a spike in intense antigovernment attitudes amongst a small segment of the public. The proportion saying they are angry with the federal government has doubled since 2000, increasing to 21% from 10%. And a larger minority of the public has come to view the federal government as a major threat to their personal freedom: 30% feel this way, up from 18% in a 2003 ABC News/Washington Post survey.

The Pew Research Center surveys provide a detailed picture of the public's opinions about government and how it differs from the climate of opinion in the late 1990s, when criticism of government had declined from earlier in the decade. At that time, the public's desire for government services and activism was holding steady.

This is not the case today. Just 22% say they can trust the government in Washington almost always or most of the time, among the lowest measures in half a century.

Opinions about elected officials are particularly poor. Just 25% have a favorable opinion of Congress while 65% have an unfavorable view—the lowest favorable ratings for Congress in more than two decades of Pew Research center surveys.

Favorable ratings for federal agencies and institutions have fallen since 1997-98 for seven of 13 federal agencies included in the survey. The declines have been particularly large for the Department of Education, the Food and Drug Administration, the Social Security Administration, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As in the past, poor performance is the most persistent criticism of the federal government. But increasingly Americans say that government has the wrong priorities and that has a negative effect on their day-to-day lives. Sixty-two percent say that government policies unfairly benefit some groups, while nearly as many (56%) say that government does not do enough to help average Americans.

There is also growing concern about the size and power of the federal government. The public is now evenly divided over whether federal government programs should be maintained to deal with important problems or cut back greatly to reduce the power of government.

A desire for smaller government is particularly evident since Barack Obama took office. In four surveys over the past year, about half have consistently said they would rather have a smaller government with fewer services, while about 40% have consistently preferred a bigger government providing more services. In October 2008, shortly before the presidential election, the public was evenly split on this question.

The public is now divided over whether it is a good idea for the government to exert more control over the economy than it has in recent years. Just 40% say this is a good idea, while a 51% majority says it is not. Last March, by 54% to 37%, more people said it was a good idea for the government to exert more control over the economy. The exception here is the undiminished support for the government to more strictly regulate the way major financial companies do business. This is favored by a 61% to 31% margin.

Record discontent with Congress and dim views of elected officials generally have poisoned the well for trust in the federal government. Public opinion about elected officials in Washington is relentlessly negative. Favorable ratings for the Democratic Party have fallen by 21 points—to 38% from 59%—over the past year and now stand at their lowest point in Pew Research surveys. The Republican Party's ratings, which increased to 46% in February from 40% last August, have fallen back to 37%.

Nonetheless, antigovernment sentiment appears to be a more significant driver of possible turnout among Republicans and independents than among Democrats. Perhaps most troubling for Democrats, independent voters who are highly frustrated with government are also highly committed to casting a ballot this year, and they favor the Republican candidates in their districts by an overwhelming 66% to 13% margin.

Mr. Kohut is president of Pew Research Center. He is a past president of the Gallup Organization and the founder of Princeton Survey Research Associates.