White House "Job Summit" Lies

I had to laugh when I heard the sound bites from Wonderboy's vaunted, pointless "jobs summit" yesterday at the White House.

The Anointed One only made a token 15 minute appearance, then hurried off to something else. Probably another speech, or reviewing the one he gave in Allentown this morning.

But the sound bite I kept hearing this morning on CNBC was this statement from Wonderboy's right-hand thug, Valerie Jarrett,

"If anyone has ideas on how to create jobs, I want to hear them."

Actually, it's a lie.

We know this because many business people and Republican Congressmen have called for two specific job-creating steps which Wonderboy refuses to acknowledge:

1. Rather than pass a $787B pork-laden "stimulus" bill, simply declare a personal income tax holiday for 2009.

2. Send legislation to Capitol Hill authorizing either permanent or very long term (10 years) reductions in payroll taxes for workers hired this year and kept for some minimum period.

These two steps would accomplish the very important task of allowing individuals, as employees and employers, to choose how to save, spend or invest their own money. Rather than have politicians construct massive spending programs to curry favor with voters or donors, using borrowed money, let individuals make their own economic choices.

This would increase individual economic freedom and liberty.

Thus, why Wonderboy and Jarrett aren't interested,

What the First Assistant Thus should have said was,

"If anyone out there has ideas which fit our far left, socialistic views on how to create jobs, I want to hear them. But I don't want to hear any ideas that promote individual control of ones own economic destiny."

Phil Jones Goes Down Over Global Warming Lies

As I described in this recent post, the hacking of East Anglia Climate Center's server resulted in publication of emails that revealed lies, distortions and other dishonest behavior by scientists claiming that global warming is real and poses a great threat to mankind.

Now, the Center's head, Phil Jones, has stepped down amidst the furor. His colleague, American scientist Michael Mann, is being investigated by his university for wrongdoing connected to the emails and various articles he has written, and possible data manipulation or suppression.

Of course, America's liberal media has missed this story. Al Gore is also nowhere in sight as the scientists and science behind Warm Boy Al's current money machine is revealed to be a fraud.

California liberal Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, chair of the Energy Committee, also seems to be absent as the climate research fraud becomes more clear.

Fortunately, the story is getting plenty of attention elsewhere around the globe. Other countries take much more seriously spending trillions of dollars for carbon emission controls when the science behind the prescriptions is now being called into serious question as the fabrication of a few self-anointed climate zealots.

Score one for common sense and freedom of information.

Wonderboy Desecrates West Point

I would imagine that George Washington, U.S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower are all spinning in their graves at the thought of Wonderboy desecrating West Point by using- and I mean using- the Army's service college to deliver a speech about the result of his dithering over Afghanistan.

At this point, it really doesn't matter what he says. Early releases of his speech indicate that he will focus more on promising a quick withdrawal of the forces he is sending than on their dispatch, or what they will do.

The three men I mentioned earlier, two West Point graduates who became President, and the first President of the Republic, who designated the site as so important, would certainly have disapproved of our First Rookie's inability to trust his commanders, make a prompt decision, and show real commitment to the war in Afghanistan.

I would not have wanted to be in uniform serving our country, at West Point, to watch this travesty. It's a disgrace to our country's armed services and the men and women currently enrolled at West Point that Wonderboy used the post as yet another prop in his never-ending teleplay that is his administration.

Too bad the service men and women being sent to Afghanistan are not in a theatrical production, like the president's speech, but are risking their lives. They deserve so much more in a commander in chief than they are getting from Obama.

Wonderboy As Commander In Chief

Our naive and inexperienced Commander In Chief has once again proven himself to be Hamlet reborn.

This week, his administration carefully leaked that Wonderboy, after months of staged "thinking" about his Afghanistan army commander's recommendation/request for 40,000 more troops, is cutting it back to 35,000.

You really can tell that our First Rookie has absolutely no sense of what the application of real military force is all about.

While not all combatants, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter and both Bushes all were at least in the military. Reagan deferred to his generals and admirals. Clinton tried to forget we had a military.

Thus, for the last 60 years, almost every American president has had some understanding that men and women die when a US president commits troops. Thus, because we are a democracy and, especially now, with a volunteer military, the commitment has to be well-reasoned, defensible, and calculated to not needless expend lives.

Instead, Wonderboy is playing political chess with American military personnels' lives.

He's worried about just accepting McChrystal's recommendation, for fear of rubber-stamping the dreaded, hated military's decisions. He won't cut and run, for fear of being justly criticized for "losing" Afghanistan. Especially after declaring it a necessary war during his pre-election campaign.

Thus, his solution to cavalierly cut some arbitrary number of to-be-deployed troops. Looks shrewd, to Wonderboy and his handlers, on paper.

Of course, to that crew, army personnel dispatched to Afghanistan are only so many flags on a map. Not real soldiers. The possibility that sending too few endangers the rest is so far from being understood by this president and his staff that it disgusts the average American.

Nowhere among Wonderboy's senior staff and handlers are any trustworthy, reputable advisers with military backgrounds.

This administration has no grasp of the nature and use of military power. Other than using military bases for photo opportunities, it can't figure out what to do with real global situations requiring the skilled application of American military power.

At least the coming sacrifices of American lives due to Wonderboy's incompetence may help usher him out of office that much sooner.

Thomas Frank Gets It Wrong Again

The Wall Street Journal's token liberal columnist, Thomas Frank, managed to write yet another misinformed piece in an edition of the paper last weekend.

In a pre-Thanksgiving piece, he held forth on how thankful he is that last year's and this year's financial mess have muzzled those who argue for free markets. In his view, what befell the US economy and financial sector in the past year is a complete failure of free market ideology.

How wrong he is.

For many years, there has been an undercurrent of concern regarding the financial audits required of listed companies. Instead of actually assuring anyone of much of value, SEC-mandated audits lulled investors into ignorance, resulting in the Enron and WorldCom scandals.

Similarly, FDIC insurance for bank deposits caused retail customers to pay less attention to the actual health of their banks. It may seem like pocket change to pay off consumer deposits when insured banks go broke, but that money has to come from somewhere. The FDIC's outflows in recent years have exceeded their inflows from bank insurance levies.

Result? Society at large pays for the risks which indifferent consumers take with their money.

How about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Their GSE status caused everyone, including the Chinese government, to blithely assume that their bonds were as sound as Treasuries. Thus, nobody really paid any attention to the trash which Congressional leaders demanded the agencies to create out of mortgage loans to increasingly poorer, riskier home buyers. Low-doc, no-doc and option ARM mortgages became components of pass through bonds backed by the US government. Ratings agencies went along for the ride and income. Oh, they are protected, too. Special exemptions in US law allow them both an oligopoly and protection from lawsuits for their opinions and ratings.

It was mortgages cranked out by the private financial sector, passed through the GSEs and turned, like rancid sausage, into something different-looking, which polluted financial markets and ultimately led to severe equity losses on the book of several of the largest US commercial and investment banks.

Nowhere in all of this were so-called "free markets" operating. No, it was all coddled and wrapped in a big green blanket of US government guarantees, insurance and regulation.

These alleged safeguards are precisely why nobody bothered to conduct any serious due diligence of their own.

When mediocre civil servants couldn't even do their regulation and oversight jobs effectively, the whole mess exploded.

Thus, Frank got it completely backwards.

Last year's penultimate financial service sector problems stemmed from too much legislation, regulation and insurance by the federal government which supplanted investors' sound judgements and critical appraisals of risks. Risks of institutional failures, instrument quality and repayment failures.

We don't have too much free market capitalism which needs more regulation and supervision.

We have too little of the former, and far too much of the ineffectual latter.

Direct Election Of Senators: A Hidden Federalization

In this post from this past June, I enumerated 10 things I believe need to be fixed in the Constitution.

Since then, I've decided there should be an additional item regarding deficits and balanced budgets. But that's for another post.

Today, I want to comment on an aspect of my ninth item which I had heretofore not realized.

In the June post, I wrote,

"9. Novice politicians gaining entry to the Senate due to the amendment requiring direct election of this body intended to be more deliberative and experienced than the House."

All I really focused on, thanks to Wonderboy's misguided election last November, was making sure that Senators have more qualifications than just age and citizenship.

Watching Mary Landrieu's comic performance during the voting to bring the Senate health care bill to the floor gave me another insight.

One unintended consequence of the direct election of Senators was the removal of an important check in the Constitutional system. It wasn't between the branches, but between the federal government and the states.

I've never seen this expressed anywhere else, so I thought I'd offer some observations.

Prior to the amendment providing for the direct election of Senators, as I noted in this post from March, 2008, quoting the Senate's own website,

"Just reflecting on the original mechanism for Senate election, it's easy to see how differently Senators prior to 1913 would behave, as opposed to modern Senators. Senators chosen by their state's political party leaders would almost of necessity be committed to the welfare of their state over their own career. Because they didn't really 'run' for the office, fund-raising, politicking as it is currently understood, and the appeal to voters' baser motivations probably didn't occur as they do today.

I can imagine Senators of that day truly behaving as the Constitution's architects intended, worrying less about their seat than carefully addressing major issues to the benefit of the country and their state."

Indirectly-elected Senators were an intentional Constitutional check on federal power. State-level political parties would ensure that Senators didn't expect lifetime careers. Rather, they were beholden to the state party, which, by necessity, had to do a good job for the state's voters, or lose its control over the legislatures.

This carefully-calibrated bias for states rights in the Senate was torn away with the passage of the 17th amendment.

After some reflection, I think it's this aspect of the direct election of Senators that has been most damaging. Representatives are subject to recall every two years. Senators, by contrast, manage to go six years between elections. Without the pre-selection by their own parties, I believe they have become disconnected from their states, to the detriment of the nation.

No longer answering to their own parties, Senators today seem to be in business mostly for themselves. Mary Landrieu's deal with Harry Reid to get a $300M dispensation for Louisiana in the health care bill does, in one sense, reflect her working for her state's benefit. But, in a larger sense, she really did damage to the nation. With no need to explain the larger benefits of the bill to her state-level Democratic party, Landrieu basically bought her seat forward with that $300M.

If she were being nominated by her party, she probably wouldn't have been quite so mercenary with everyone's money.

I believe that indirectly-elected Senators had to assure their parties back in the home state that they were working for both the country's and the state's good. If the state party saw voters leaning one way on an issue, they could and probably did make clear to the Senator how s/he should vote, if s/he were to remain in the seat.

Not so anymore. Now, it's mostly a popularity contest, with Senators often feeling themselves above the state party apparatus, once elected.

Issues like tax levels and fiscal rectitude don't seem to matter to the Senate anymore. They avoid taking responsibility for excessive spending, buying votes with it.

But the Senators of old didn't need to do that, because their voters were the state party politicians in the legislatures.

It seems to me that this unintended consequence has had seriously bad long term consequences for our nation. A key states' rights linkage, the indirect election of Senators, was removed, implicitly handing much more power to the federal government, and insulating Senators from any real pressure from their own states' parties.

Now, More Inconvenient Climate Truths

Some embarrassing information- inconvenient truths, if you will- recently came to light. A Wall Street Journal piece provides some of the details.

Keith Johnson begins his article,

"The scientific community is buzzing over thousands of emails and documents -- posted on the Internet last week after being hacked from a prominent climate-change research center -- that some say raise ethical questions about a group of scientists who contend humans are responsible for global warming.

The correspondence between dozens of climate-change researchers, including many in the U.S., illustrates bitter feelings among those who believe human activities cause global warming toward rivals who argue that the link between humans and climate change remains uncertain.

Some emails also refer to efforts by scientists who believe man is causing global warming to exclude contrary views from important scientific publications."

Oops! No politicization or fraudulent behavior here, eh? And what about all those liberals contending that "the debate is over?"

The article continues,

""This is horrible," said Pat Michaels, a climate scientist at the Cato Institute in Washington who is mentioned negatively in the emails. "This is what everyone feared. Over the years, it has become increasingly difficult for anyone who does not view global warming as an end-of-the-world issue to publish papers. This isn't questionable practice, this is unethical." "

Yeah, it ends faster when your side lies about the facts, doesn't it?

The Journal piece reports,

"In all, more than 1,000 emails and more than 2,000 other documents were stolen Thursday from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University in the U.K. The identity of the hackers isn't certain, but the files were posted on a Russian file-sharing server late Thursday, and university officials confirmed over the weekend that their computer had been attacked and said the documents appeared to be genuine.

Most climate scientists today argue that the earth's temperature is rising, and nearly all of those agree that human activity is likely to be a prime or at least significant cause. But a vocal minority dispute one or both of those views.

A partial review of the hacked material suggests there was an effort at East Anglia, which houses an important center of global climate research, to shut out dissenters and their points of view.

In the emails, which date to 1996, researchers in the U.S. and the U.K. repeatedly take issue with climate research at odds with their own findings. In some cases, they discuss ways to rebut what they call "disinformation" using new articles in scientific journals or popular Web sites.

The emails include discussions of apparent efforts to make sure that reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that monitors climate science, include their own views and exclude others. In addition, emails show that climate scientists declined to make their data available to scientists whose views they disagreed with.

In another, Phil Jones, the director of the East Anglia climate center, suggested to climate scientist Michael Mann of Penn State University that skeptics' research was unwelcome: We "will keep them out somehow -- even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" Neither man could be reached for comment Sunday."

So, basically, these liberal global warming theorists have been at work for more than a decade lying, falsifying data, intimidating and foreclosing the publication of dissenters.

Not only does it seem that the debate on human sources of climate change isn't over. It appears that we can't even trust the data, since these emails provide evidence that it's been tainted by these biased researchers.