It's Bush's Fault

Things have been quiet on the Indispensable Man front lately, but that has now changed as progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans ganged up on him at a hearing yesterday: Geithner on the Hot Seat

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner appeared before the Joint Economic Committee today. One striking feature of Geithner's testimony was how partisan it was. In keeping with the Obama administration's mantra, he repeatedly tried to cast blame on the Bush administration while failing to acknowledge that when the financial crisis developed, he was the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and as such one of the most influential figures in our financial system. If he saw the crisis coming, or thought that the administration's policies were badly misguided, he had every opportunity to speak up, and his words would have been highly influential. But he did no such thing.

I had lunch with Geithner a couple of years ago, when he headed the New York Fed and before the crisis developed. It was an odd encounter: he seemed to want to convey the impression that he was in the know and privy to deep secrets, and that he was wiser than the other leading figures responsible for economic policy. But he did this without ever saying anything substantive or even, frankly, very coherent. If he had any disagreement with the policies of the Fed or of the Bush Treasury Department, he never hinted at what they might be.

As Powerline points out, the Indispensable Man was not brought in to clean up the Bush Administration's mess; he was right there making the mess! There are arguments to be made in favor of the bailouts, at least of financial institutions, but these are few and hard to come by. Instead, there was a lot of crisis-talk and fear mongering, followed by a rushed passage of a TARP fund that didn't do what it was supposed to do! No one has ever used TARP money to buy troubled assets. Is it any wonder that people are furious? But, now that the government has its ill-gotten funds it refuses to give it up, citing Evil Bush as reason enough to keep interfering in the economy. We have gotten used to Too Big To Fail. Now, the Indispensable Man is exploring the limits of Too Smart to Succeed.

Very Low Tech

Just in time for the debate over nationalizing health care, the air traffic control system came to a halt because a card in a router in Utah failed. Tech Snafu Grounds Nation's Fliers

The failure of a single piece of computer gear in Utah disrupted travel for thousands Thursday, exposing the risks of the long-running patchwork upgrade of the nation's air-traffic-control system.

It is the second time in 15 months that a tech glitch threw air travel into disarray across large swaths of the country. The problems took four hours to resolve, and prompted fresh calls from Congress for the Federal Aviation Administration and its private contractors to do more to prevent cascading delays caused by relatively small problems.

The FAA has been struggling for years to upgrade its antiquated systems, layering modern hardware and software on top of decades-old air-traffic-control technology critical to day-to-day operations. Fully modernizing could take at least another decade and as much as $40 billion in public and private funding. Debates over who would pay and how the money would be spent have held back progress.

A member of my family was working at the Dept. of Transportation when the FAA was in the midst of "modernizing" the air traffic control system. It was already years over due and fatally over-budget. This was back in 1990. 1990! Things obviously haven't gotten better. Management of the air transport system is the sort of work that the government should be doing, so I'm not going to start building my Libertarian private sector alternative to the FAA. However, this does highlight the fundamental problem of Big Government: it tries to do so much that it cannot do anything at all very well, even when the task at hand is one where the government enjoys a monopoly.

Law & Order

Lindsey Graham is not on anyone's list of great Republicans, but when he is on, he is good. His grilling of Eric Holder has received praise far and wide, and justifiably so. Of course, it helped that Holder was completely unprepared, no doubt because he has been self-marinating in his self-righteousness since 2002. Graham wasn't even trying very hard, yet Holder could not answer without stammering and leaving uncomfortable pauses in his responses. Even Janet Reno was more on the ball than this guy:

Ann Althouse: Lindsey Graham Devastates Eric Holder

Holder imagines that he can hide inside that "thoughtful" routine that Obama so often relies on, but it is utterly pathetic here. Either he knows damned well what he's doing and he's lying or he's outrageously unqualified for his job. His evasive style is so similar to Obama's that he makes Obama look worse.

Powerline: Reading Bin Laden His Rights

Can you imagine any other context in which the President of the United States would assure the public that a criminal defendant is guilty; that he will be convicted by a jury; and that he will be executed? Such comments make a mockery of the "rule of law" as normally understood.

It's true, of course, that Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are obviously guilty of the terrorist attacks of which they proudly boast. We don't need a judge and jury to tell us this. In my view, we would be amply justified in simply shooting them.

But if only one jury verdict is acceptable; if the President is willing to assure the American people of conviction; if acquittal or a hung jury is "not an option;" if, assuming such a result, the defendant would be returned to prison anyway--then it is ridiculous to say that we are going through this charade in order to "vindicate the rule of law."

Perhaps the best was Andrew McCarthy, who noted that Holder's old law firm was among the gold rush of pro bono lawyers flying down to GITMO to engage in lawfare for no better reason than to get back at Bush: Justice Delayed

Of all the infuriating aspects of the decision to transfer five 9/11 war criminals to civilian federal court, the one that grates most is the contention that the Obama administration is finally moving forward after “eight years of delay” — as Attorney General Eric Holder put it at his Friday press conference — during which the Bush administration managed to complete only three military-commission trials.

This is chutzpah writ large. The principal reason there were so few military trials is the tireless campaign conducted by leftist lawyers to derail military tribunals by challenging them in the courts. Many of those lawyers are now working for the Obama Justice Department. That includes Holder, whose firm, Covington & Burling, volunteered its services to at least 18 of America’s enemies in lawsuits they brought against the American people. (During 2007 alone, Covington contributed more than 3,000 hours of free, top-flight legal assistance to our enemy detainees.)

All of this makes the acute embarrassment of watching Chuck Schumer torment Alberto Gonzalez a little more easy to bear.

No TV Party Tonight

CA may be having a massive fiscal and economic crisis, but that doesn't mean we can't continue to burnish our reputation as eco-nut fruitcakes. Consider the proposed ban on televisions of a certain size: California Targets TV's to Lower Electricity Demand

The most power-hungry television sets could soon be banned from store shelves in California as state energy regulators on Wednesday consider a first-in-the nation mandate intended to lower electricity demand.

If adopted, the regulations will require televisions sold in California to be more energy efficient beginning in 2011. The requirement would be tougher in 2013, with only one-quarter of the TVs on the market currently meeting that standard.

Energy commissioners say TVs account for about 10 percent of a home's electricity use. The concern is that the energy draw will rise by as much as 8 percent a year as consumers buy larger televisions, add more to their homes and watch them longer.

Some manufacturers say implementing a power standard will cripple innovation, limit consumer choice and harm California retailers because consumers could simply buy TVs out of state or order them online.

The standards would apply to all TVs up to 58 inches, allowing increasing power use for larger TVs.

Someone call these guys and tell them that the impetus to combat "climate change" is slowing to a crawl because certain countries are not willing to cripple their economies for the sake of Greens living in La-La Land: How Copenhagen Died During barack Obama's Asian Trip. At this point, nothing short of an actual war (not a phony Carter-esque Moral Equivalent of War) will be enough to convince the Chinese that they should spend trillions of dollars to hobble their factories in pursuit of Al Gore's chimeras. I have it on good authority that Nobel Prizes, Oscars and even Grammies don't have the same hypnotic effect on the Chinese as they do on westerners.

Actually, it's a little surprising that the Chinese wouldn't want to go along with this. Global Warming/Climate Change is practically a bureaucrat's Permanent Employment Concession. Supposedly, Greens are the hip set, unlike all those oppressive Republicans and conservatives, but you would never see Sarah Palin or her acolytes declaring in all seriousness that they must pass laws regulating the type of televisions that we can have in our homes. It's unusual for American greens to be so open in aspiring to limit our freedom, even if it's the freedom to watch big-screen TV's. They must feel pretty comfortable in their sinecures.

Just Asking Questions

James Pethokoukis notes that the Chinese are using Obama's trip to ask him tough questions about progressive health care reform, specifically whether he honestly thinks the plans presently under consideration will reduce costs (in a word "No"). God forbid American media outlets show the same curiosity: China Questions Costs of US Health Care Reform

Guess what? It turns out the Chinese are kind of curious about how President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform plans would impact America’s huge fiscal deficit. Government officials are using his Asian trip as an opportunity to ask the White House questions. Detailed questions.

Boilerplate assurances that America won’t default on its debt or inflate the shortfall away are apparently not cutting it. Nor should they, when one owns nearly $2 trillion in assets denominated in the currency of a country about to double its national debt over the next decade.

Nothing happening in Washington today should give Beijing any comfort or confidence about what may happen tomorrow. Healthcare reform was originally promoted as a way to “bend the curve” on escalating entitlement costs, the major part of which is financing Medicare and Medicaid. That is looking more and more like an overpromised deliverable.

Progressives would never dream of listening to the concerns of middle class Americans. They would rather just call them teabaggers and racists. But if the concerns come from an authoritarian dictatorship steeped in Marxist-Leninist thought? Much more receptive!

Harvestor of Sorrows

The next time someone tells you that California is "tuff on crime," remember this guy. Curtis Martin killed his girlfriend Zolena Williams and then threw her two year old son into the Bay to drown. I don't want to shock anyone with the obvious, but this was not the first time Martin was in trouble for beating up women and killing kids: Murder Suspect Dodged Prosecution twice in '08

The parolee suspected of killing an Oakland woman and possibly her young child was arrested twice in 2008 for allegedly violating a restraining order obtained by a previous girlfriend who said he had beaten her and threatened her 13-year-old son, court records show.

Alameda County prosecutors, however, never brought charges against Curtis Martin III, 38, who had already served five years in state prison for beating a child to death, the records show.

It's an article of faith among the progressive and enlightened ones that CA is an especially cruel state because of its Three Sttikes law and crowded prisons. So what put Curtis Martin out on the streets after just 5 (!!) years for beating a child to death? The family is outraged as they should be: that a man like this was out on the streets was a complete betrayal, and not just by the state. The community activists and progressive legal eagles who claim to act on behalf of families like the Williams insist that men like Martin be freed from prison on every possible pretext. Supposedly, this is done to promote a more just society, but the practical result is an injustice to the innocents in the neighborhoods where criminals end up hanging their hats. This is one of those areas in life where the conservative way of doing things - long prison sentences, support for the police, an end to procedural rules that absolutely favor defendants - would lead to better results: safer streets.

No doubt the conservative position is insufficiently nuanced, and would not protect everyone at all times. But the spectacle of a man killing a child after he had already been convicted of killing another is something that we, and the Williams family, don't really need to endure.

Jesus, Just Do It & Get It Over With

The Palestinians have hit on a new strategy for gaining statehood: petition the UN to recognize the West Bank and Gaza Strip as the Palestinian nation! Come on. If they were serious about wanting their own state, they would have done this long ago: Palestinians Weigh UN Statehood Declaration

Palestinian officials said Sunday they are considering a unilateral appeal for United Nations Security Council recognition of a state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, separate from Israel.

The move is highly unlikely to progress in the international body, but it represents the latest sign of Palestinian frustration at the halting progress of U.S.-brokered peace efforts.

The Palestinians don't have the guts to do something like this. They would have to give up so much: their whiny Ethnic Grievance Theater, their billions in UN money for "refugees" (some dating back 60 years!), their ability to attack Israel with impunity (every suicide bomber and rocket launched from "Palestine" would be an act of war), plus Fatah/Hamas/whomever would actually have to govern a nation, rather than "govern" by beating their breasts over the Occupation. No, they're not going anywhere.

Right Wing Book Club

THE FORSAKEN

By Tim Tzouliadis

An incredible book about Americans who found themselves caught up in the Soviet Gulag, a phenomenon that has largely been lost to history (although authors like Whittaker Chambers and IB Singer mentioned it). Hard as it might be to believe, thousands of American leftists moved to the Soviet Union in the Thirties, convinced it would be the vanguard of the future. Instead, they found a cruel, paranoid totalitarian state that would eventually arrest and kill them all. There are very few happy endings in this book. If you weren't shot, you were shipped off to the camps for re-education, but the camps were set up to be killing machines. You were simply worked to death, thousands of miles from anyone who could help.

Tzouliadis thoroughly traces the crimes of the Soviets, and his descriptions of the elements of the Stalinist Terror - from the late night arrests by the NKVD to the torture sessions in Lubynaka prison to the show trials to the brutal transportation to Siberia and beyond to the harrowing life of a slave laborer in the land of "social justice" - are masterful, not to mention harrowing; but special mention should be made for the American progressives who encouraged people to emigrate to the Soviet Union and then turned a blind eye when everyone they knew in Moscow was being arrested and "liquidated." There was Walter Duranty, the NY Times correspondent who never wrote a negative word during his years in Moscow. There was the US Ambassador Joseph Davies who wrote a memoir of his time in Moscow that was so obsequious the Soviet censors did not have to change a word. There was Paul Robeson, who literally sang songs to Stalin. And there was Henry Wallace - vice president in FDR's third term - who actually toured the Gulag (while in office!) and pronounced everything hunky-dory. All of these men would see their reputations destroyed during the McCarthy Era, which makes me think McCarthy may have been on to something. The connection between Stalinist Russia and certain elements of the American Left has never been presented more clearly or starkly.

While the story is certainly dramatic, it is enhanced by Tzouliadis' writing, which is of a very high quality. He manages to convey both the overall society-wide scope of the Terror, while also remaining focused on the experiences of the individuals caught up in its web. My only complaint, Tzouliadis refers to a number of photographs and documents that he viewed, but ... doesn't reproduce them in the book! Actually, that brings up my second complaint; the book is completely lacking in maps, which is frustrating since Tzouliadis ranges all over the Soviet Union to tell his tale. Nonetheless, this is one of the best books of the year, and highly recommended.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

John J Pitney brings valuable perspective to Barack Obama's assertion that he is America's first "Pacific President." Obama means to say that he is the first to have been born and raised in the Pacific - true enough as he spent most of his childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia. But there are plenty of American presidents who had adult experience in the Pacific that maybe was a little more relevant preparation for the Presidency: America's First Pacific President

It is true that the president was born in Hawaii (sorry, birthers), lived from ages six to ten in Indonesia, and attended a Honolulu prep school. But he is not our first Pacific president. Richard Nixon was born in California in 1913, and spent much more of his life in the Pacific region than the current president has. Moreover, while Barack Obama made his career in Chicago and Springfield, Ronald Reagan made his in Los Angeles and Sacramento.

And the incumbent is hardly the first chief executive to have lived in another Pacific Rim country. William Howard Taft was governor-general of the Philippines. Dwight Eisenhower had military postings in the Philippines and the Panama Canal Zone. Herbert Hoover worked as a mining engineer in Australia and China; he even learned to speak Mandarin. Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Bush 41 all served in the Pacific during the Second World War. What they did as adults was perhaps more consequential than what Obama did as a child.

Pitney might also have mentioned that Ulysses S Grant made a months long trip to Japan after his presidency was over, and that John McCain was born in Panama and served with distinction in a "Pacific" war, and further that McCain's family spent decades involved in the Pacific Rim.

We've all gotten used to Obama's self-aggrandizing view of the world and his fabulous world-historic self. While this is mostly a result of his arrogance and ego, it is also the product of his - and his speech writers - ignorance about American history. They undoubtedly are the products of elite educations and meritocratic CV buffing, yet they seem to honestly think that, until Obama came along, America lacked a Pacific perspective. Newsflash boys: Americans, especially Californians, have been traveling back and forth to Asia for decades. We have fought not one, not two, but three major Asian land wars, plus been involved in Pacific Rim power politics since the day Admiral Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay. The next time you decide to declare Obama to be the "first" of anything, I would suggest growing up and getting a clue, or at least reading a book.

Obama might also consider the transitory nature of human affairs. Pitney's mention of Taft's turn as governor-general of the Philippines reminds me of how even America's most remarkable figures are often forgotten and ignored by us. Taft was not a memorably great president, but he certainly had an impact on us. He was Teddy Roosevelt's right hand man in foreign policy during an era when America was spreading its wings as a global power. After his presidency (lost thanks to TR's maverick third party run), he became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, where he presided over the Court of Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis. More important, he helped create the modern Supreme Court and federal judiciary through his advocacy for the passage of the Judiciary Act, the creation of the modern "docket system," the promulgation of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and even the construction of the Supreme Court Building. Yet, most of our public schools are comfortable simply teaching kids that Taft was the fattest man to ever be President. Is it any wonder that the smartest among us are often the least knowledgeable?

Anyway, except for the accident of birth, Obama has no perspective that could be called "Pacific," unless he is about to start advocating for heavy industrialization, crony capitalism, and ancestor worship. If Obama is anything, he is our first "European" president kind of like how Bill Clinton was our first "black" president. Maybe, instead of trying to tell us what superlatives to apply, Obama should just do his d*** job.

Hanging on the Telephone

You may have noticed that there is very little discussion of tech-related issues on this blog for the simple reason that I am usually 2 years behind everyone else in my devise purchasing. But, I find myself unaccountably excited about the Google via Motorola Android Smartphone, which is being hyped as the first true rival to the i-phone: Ultimate Smart Phone Smackdown

The buzzword in the cell phone industry since 2007 has been “iPhone Killer.” Since mere days after the release of the iPhone the other players in the industry were talking about how they were going to compete with the amazing piece of technology. Many have been up to bat since then: LG Prada, T-Mobile G1, Palm Pre, Nokia N90, the list seems to go on and on. The one thing they all have in common? They failed miserably at replicating the great experience that Apple offers with the iPhone. They just weren’t the same.

Enter the holy trifecta of Motorola, Google, and Verizon Wireless. Motorola is looking for a bump in business after they have failed to see success with any device since their RAZR, Google is looking for a way to push their Android OS to new levels of popularity, and Verizon Wireless is just looking to carry a smartphone that people actually want to buy. The three have teamed up to create the Droid, the kickoff phone for version 2.0 of Android as well as a new Verizon campaign to bring Android devices to the carrier. Is this the perfect storm needed to knock the iPhone off its pedestal? We’re going to compare the Droid and the iPhone in a category-by-category, side-by-side battle to the…death?

The guy writing the above concludes that the Android is a touch superior to the i-phone, which is quite an achievement, if true. I'm a big Google user and had high hopes when I heard they were developing a smartphone. I now find myself prostrate before a massive hype-wave roaring toward the shore. Moan.

The God That Failed

There may be more oppressive socialist regimes out there (North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Berkeley), but none are as ludicrously controlling as the Red Chinese. They aspire to control what would seem to be uncontrollable: the procreation of children, the divine appointment of the Panchen and Dalai Lamas, the flight of pigeons in Beijing, searches on the Internet, etc. Now, they aspire to the ultimate symbol of Man-As-God planning: control of the weather: Blizzard Renews Storm Over China Making Snow

Heavy snowfall in northern China is testing the country's disaster preparedness and prompting fresh questions about Beijing's efforts to alter its weather.

A massive blizzard over the past week has dumped some of the heaviest snow in five decades on China's usually arid north, clogging highways and collapsing buildings in seven provinces. The storm, which began Monday, had caused at least $650 million in damage as of Friday afternoon and killed more than 40 people in traffic accidents or building collapses triggered by the snow and ice, the government said.

This week's storm follows an unusually early snowfall that blanketed Beijing on Nov.1. Government media attributed the intensity of the storm to the Beijing Weather Modification Office, which is responsible for cloud seeding efforts in the capital.

"Beijing Weather Modification Office?"

There is some doubt as to whether the Chinese efforts are really having such an extreme effect. There have already been some early snowfalls in the US, after all. Still, it's clear that the Chinese are doing this without taking heed for either the extent of the direct effects of their seeding or for the secondary effects on the masses on the ground (the linked article mentions dozens of deaths and major damage as a result of the storm).

We keep hearing that the Chinese are "going green" and should be our exemplars as stewards of the planet. Yet, their behavior is just the opposite, and not limited to building hundreds of coal-fired factories and power plants. To control the rampaging floods on the Yangtze River, they built the Three Gorges Dam, which displaced millions, drowned a scenic treasure, triggered landslides, and continues to have an unintended impact on the environment. Some scientists believe last year's Sichuan earthquake may have been caused in part by the Zipingpu Dam. This damn the torpedoes approach to cloud seeding - despite open questions about its efficacy and its effects on the ground and in the world's environment is of a piece with this.

Photo of the Day

THIS is Khalid Sheik Mohammad?? What happened to the undershirt?

It's hard to believe a radical Islamist could get more religious, but KSM has definitely taken things to the next level.