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.
Friday, November 20, 2009
It's Bush's Fault
Very Low Tech
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.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Law & Order
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.
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."
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 EricHolder 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.)
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
No TV Party Tonight
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.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Just Asking Questions
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.
Harvestor of Sorrows
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.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.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.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Jesus, Just Do It & Get It Over With
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.
Right Wing Book Club
Sunday, November 15, 2009
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
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.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Hanging on the Telephone
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 God That Failed
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.



