After Barack Obama’s embrace of the troops in Iraq I was actually warming up to the guy, but now that his international bow and flagellate tour is interrupted by a hostage crisis on the high seas, his silence is shameful and embarrassing. There were more pirate attacks this time last year off the coast of Somalia, and yet it is now, for the first time in, what, centuries, that an American vessel has been hijacked by pirates in, what, centuries? The pirates want to see how weak we are, and I fear Barack Obama, with all the nuance he can muster, just may demonstrate exactly how far we can capitulate.

Today, for the first time in a long time, I missed George W Bush. Someone who wasn’t afraid to call an evildoer evil, and when hit in the mouth took the fight to terrorists. I have some problems with how the Iraq war has been handled, but during the Bush administration nobody wanted to hijack our boats and push us around to get paid.

What irks me most is it seems that Barack’s biggest problem is how the pirate’s are crimping his style.

I got this in the inbox:

I asked my friend's little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She
said she wanted to be President some day. 

Both of her parents, liberal Democrats, were standing there, so I asked her, 'If
you were President what would be the first thing you would do?' 

She replied, 'I'd give food and houses to all the homeless people.' 

'Wow...what a worthy goal.' I told her, 'You don't have to wait until you're
President to do that. You can come over to my house and mow, pull weeds, and
sweep my yard, and I'll pay you $50.
-Then I'll take you over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out,
and you can give him the $50 to use toward food and a new house.' 

She thought that over for a few seconds while her Mom glared at me, then she
looked me straight in the eye and asked, 'Why doesn't the homeless guy come over
and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50?' 

I said, ‘So you’re running as a Republican.’

Her folks still aren’t talking to me.

I would add something like, Goldwater Republican, or perhaps Reagan Republican. Definitely not a compassionate conservative, who would pay a Mexican $25 to pull weeds and invest the rest in a hedge fund through AIG.

Rather crude and not for kids.

Speaking of conflicts of interest, it should be noted that Paulson’s three immediate predecessors as CEO of Goldman Sachs — Jon Corzine, Stephen Friedman, and Robert Rubin — each left the company to become a U.S. Senator, chairman of the National Economic Council, and Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration, respectively. If there isn’t a conspiracy theory website about this, somebody should really buy www.goldmansachsisinfiltratingthegovernment.com.

Also funny, Obama’s mental notes

As always here on Logipundit.com we want you to know that there is more than two ways to look at a subject, and that it occasionally might require us to use our imagination (and well…brains)  to come up with alternative solutions.

For instance, let’s imagine for a second that our Congress had authority over our economy…which if I’m not mistaken was the way our Constitution was originally intended.  Second, let’s pretend that whoever is in charge has FISCAL authority, and not simply MONETARY tools with which to manipulate our financial system.

And let’s further go down the yellow brick road and pretend that it might be a good idea to make our country even MORE economically competitive (and attractive to outside investment) by NOT trying to tax our producers to death.

If we were to live in this dream world, then the following article from NRO might represent an alternative to just forking out $700 BILLION of taxpayer money for Bureaucrats in Washington to have “tight controls” over our financial institutions:

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R., Texas) chairs the Republican Study Committee, the congressional caucus of idea-driven, free-market stalwarts. These practicing Reaganites seem appalled to watch their GOP president morph before their eyes from GWB to LBJ to FDR. At a Capitol Hill press conference at high noon on Tuesday, Hensarling and a dozen RSC members expressed deep misgivings about Bush’s $700-billion baby. Preferring to drown it in the bathwater, Hensarling and his band of true believers rejected Bush’s collectivism and offered their own proposals for escaping this rubble — and returning America to a path of robust growth:

Give the capital-gains tax a two-year vacation. “Suspending capital gains taxes would bring as much as a trillion dollars of capital sitting on the sidelines back into the market,” Hensarling predicts. Also, as the Tax Foundation proposes, cutting America’s 35-percent corporate tax — the industrialized world’s second highest, after Japan’s — would boost U.S. global competitiveness. Since equity prices partially reflect long-term after-tax profits, lowering corporate levies should buoy stock markets.

Denationalize, then privatize Fannie and Freddie. “These troubled financial Frankensteins — created in a government laboratory — are not creatures of the free enterprise system,” Hensarling said. “We must ultimately take their monopoly powers away and return them to the marketplace.” Why not array Fannie’s and Freddie’s loans according to mortgage holders’ surnames? They then could be divided alphabetically into 26 units and auctioned off.

Waive “mark-to-market” accounting. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s John Berlau argues, when distressed mortgage-backed securities sell at bargain-basement prices, unhelpful new bookkeeping regulations require that similar instruments elsewhere — including viable loans — be valued at equally low prices. This needlessly stains balance sheets.

Strengthen the dollar. Bernanke should boost U.S. currency, not pose as America’s uber-stock broker. A strong dollar lowers inflation, cheapens oil, and soothes world markets.

Sounds crazy, people who profess to be proponents of Free Markets actually proposing alternative legislation to keep our markets free. As the article goes on to point out, nothing can be less imaginative than the Bush plan to simply buy “troubled assets.”

Meanwhile, as of a few hours ago, a bunch of “Bi-partisan” big government schmuckheads swore they were getting “close to a deal.”

Nothing scares me more than “Bi-partisanship” in today’s Congress. The next time I hear the terms “Bi-partisan” or “reach across the aisle,” I think there is not enough duct tape on the planet to keep my head from exploding.

Great quote from Nancy Pelosi:

“If freedom loving people throughout the world do not speak out against China’s oppression and China and Tibet, we have lost all moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world,” said Mrs. Pelosi, a Democrat.

I must give the good speaker credit when due.  I wouldn’t expect Denny Hastert to be visiting the Dalai Lama.  George W Bush, who has talked a good game about spreading democracy, has been much more ambivalent on his approach to China, and the upcoming olympic games.  For shame, Mr. President.  It is sad to see that on an issue of such importance he is outflanked on the right by Nancy Pelosi, of all people.

A New York Times op-ed proposes a neat idea that makes cynics like me savor the idea of George W Bush sabotaging the economy for his predecessor, either a Democrat or John McCain. Get all the consumer spending and economic boost out of the tax cuts this year and repeal them in the beginning of next year, so a real recession can fall in the lap of the next president. The gist:

t’s true that more tax cuts this year could help head off a recession in the short run. Washington could send taxpayers rebate checks or give businesses temporary breaks for new investments in equipment. President Bush is likely to propose both as part of his $150 billion package of emergency measures.

But if they were repealed in a year, the Bush tax cuts could spur a burst of economic activity in 2008. If people knew that their tax rates were going up next year, they’d work to make sure that more of their income is taxed at this year’s lower rates. Investors would likewise have a giant incentive to cash out their capital gains now to avoid paying higher taxes later. In 1986, stock sales doubled as taxpayers rushed to avoid the capital gains tax rate increase scheduled for 1987. If people pour their stock gains into yachts and fast cars, that’s pure fiscal stimulus.

Now, for the good of the American economy, I can’t support this policy because on balance I don’t want to raise taxes, period. When taxes are at about 20% of income for the higher brackets, then we can negotiate. Between federal, state, and sometimes city income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, death taxes, and capital gains taxes, there are just too many taxes on us. But the cynic in me likes the idea of W giving Clinton or McCain a big crap sandwich to eat for their short four-year tenure (which I predict would happen with either of those two candidates).

Watching the news conference last week, one of the things that might leave people feeling somewhat disoriented is the president’s seemingly effortless high spirits. He’s in a good mood. There was the usual teasing, the partly aggressive, partly joshing humor, the certitude. He doesn’t seem to be suffering, which is jarring.

Presidents in great enterprises that are going badly suffer: Lincoln, LBJ with his head in his hands. Why doesn’t Mr. Bush? Every major domestic initiative of his second term has been ill thought through and ended in failure. His Iraq leadership has failed. His standing is lower than any previous president’s since polling began. He’s in a good mood. Discuss.

The White House says it wants to appoint a high-powered official to oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and issue directions to the Pentagon and the State Department. This person would be called “the President of the United States”.

The editorial in the National Review today highlights all the reasons US policy should be geared towards a more protectionist stance towards China, namely, it subsidizes all aspects of its economy through state controlled banks, making it hard to determine to what degree each industry is subsidized. In the US, we subsidize corn heavily. If the EU or other countries wish to block our corn to their market, it is their right to do so. With China it isn’t so easy to tell.

The interesting part of the editorial is this:

That’s bad enough, but consumers should have bigger worries on the heels of this announcement. The Commerce Department ruling opens the door to new tariffs on everything from steel to textiles, because it reverses a decades-old policy of treating China as a non-market (Communist) economy for the purposes of assigning “countervailing duties,” which are tariffs that offset subsidized exports. Because it’s difficult to know which exports are subsidized in a Communist country, Congress has traditionally exempted non-market economies from countervailing duties, subjecting them instead to lower tariffs called “antidumping duties.” The new policy at Commerce doesn’t change China’s status from non-market to market economy. Instead, it treats China as both in order to maximize the political payoff.

Lowry and company are upset that Bush and congress want to use the rules that apply to democracies (countervailing duties) to communist, non-market China. What’s all this talk I hear about open markets in China, then? If China wants to step up to the plate with the big kids, it should be prepared for a little blowback. Chinese policy has thrived on this ambiguity for too long, seemingly open markets for deep-pocketed investors, but a good deal of governmental control over property rights for the little guy. If this is a token gesture by the White House to gain approval for a free trade deal with South Korea, it is one of the wiser trade moves this admin will make (a low standard, for sure). South Korea is a thriving democracy and has been an ally, and wages there are comparable to ours, so we will be less subject to the kind of dumping of low-quality cheap goods that we get from China.

Trade agreements should make geopolitical and economic sense. Economic trade with China during the cold war made sense because it further alienated the Soviets, in a post cold war world, it only makes sense that trade be more diversified.

Then, when I read stories like the Chinese lady who fell six stories onto a pile of human excrement, I breath a sigh of relief. Perhaps China is a paper dragon after all.

NPR brings to light a border dispute involving… the mexican military? Providing cover for a drug smuggling ring? I predict Bush will call the local law enforcement “vigilantes” and proclaim that the Mexican smuggling incursions into the US are to provide drugs that Americans aren’t willing to grow.

Posted at 09:19 pm by Johnny B

	Posted by BP @ 01/27/2006 09:49 AM PST
	That’s absolutely what will happen (at least the first part), and–as my grandmother used to say–”that just boils my blood.”