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We'll be traveling back today from the great state of Virginia to the dysfunctional state of New York.   Imagine:  New York will soon be governed by Mario Cuomo's son.  The excitement builds.  I can't wait for all the progress.

DECEMBER 6,  2010

GALLUP BRINGS A FEW SMILES – AT 10:35 P.M. ET:   Ah, the ability of some good polls to enliven the day and make politics bearable.  Gallup reports that George W. Bush's approval rating is now higher than Barack Obama's.  Rehabilitation has quickly come.  From The Politico:

George W. Bush’s job approval rating as president has spiked to 47 percent, according to a Gallup poll released Monday.

That’s 1 point higher than President Barack Obama’s job approval rating in a poll taken the same week.

This is the first time Gallup asked Americans to retrospectively rate Bush’s job performance. And it was a stunning turnaround from his low point of 25 percent in November 2008. The 47 percent number is 13 points higher than the last Gallup poll taken before Bush left office in 2009 and the highest rating for him since before Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Clearly, Mr. Bush's recent appearances in connection with his new book have helped.  The contrast between the decisive Bush and the meandering Obama is substantial, and it's showing up in the numbers.

And there is this, also from Gallup:

Jimmy Carter’s job approval rating as president has nosedived during the past decade, according to a Gallup Poll released Monday.

Asked to reflect on his single term, only 52 percent of those surveyed approved of his performance — down from 61 percent in 2006 and 69 percent in 1999.

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

Carter’s numbers collapsed among Republicans (down from 42 percent in 2006 to 34 percent in 2010) and independents (57 percent to 47 percent in the same period).

History has not been particularly kind to the former Democratic president, now linked in the American consciousness with malaise, stagflation and the relative decline of American power. He was defeated for reelection by Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Bush up, Carter down.  I will sleep soundly tonight, confident in the wisdom of the American people. 

December 6, 2010       Permalink

TAX DEAL REACHED – AT 10:09 P.M. ET:  I've now returned to New York.  As I crossed the border into New York State, my car received an immediate cost-of-parking adjustment.

I return to the news that President Obama and the Republicans have reached agreement on a tax plan.  The white smoke was seen rising from the White House a little while ago.  Nancy Pelosi condemned it as another source of pollution.  From Fox News:

Obama outlined a deal with congressional leaders that would extend the expiring tax cuts for all Americans temporarily for two years. Unemployment benefits for long-term jobless would extend through next year. The estate tax rate would be renewed at the previously lower rate temporarily.

And Obama shrewdly added something else:

The Obama administration also is proposing a one-year payroll tax reduction that sources say would cut the amount contributed to Social Security from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent.

"I have no doubt that everyone will find something in this compromise that they don't like," he said, but "we cannot play politics at a time when the American people are looking for us to solve problems."
House Republican Leader John Boehner's office hailed the announcement.

"It’s encouraging that the White House is now willing to stop all of the job-killing tax hikes scheduled for January 1," Boehner spokesman Mike Steel said. "We look forward to discussing this proposal with House Republican members and the American people."

Sounds like a reasonable plan, and the temporary reduction in the payroll tax is good for the economy.  Obama outclassed the GOP on that one

But there are problems.  Mr. Obama's leftist allies, or former allies, and not happy with reasonableness.

"We oppose acceding to Republican demands to extend the Bush tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires," Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., said in a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Obama "should not back down. Nor should we."

The renewal of the estate tax also could be tough to swallow for liberal Democrats, who have argued for the higher pre-Bush rate.

Annd Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's office released a statement saying only that Reid "plans on discussing it with his caucus tomorrow."

Remember that the new Congress won't be sworn until January.  What we have meeting now is the heavily liberal Congress elected with Obama in 2008.  Wouldn't it be a gas if the liberals refused to go along with the deal and destroyed the whole thing? 

I don't think that will happen.  I'd imagine that enough Dems will defect from liberal orthodoxy to make sure that the middle-class tax cuts continue beyond January 1st.  But I'd also imagine that there will be many symbolic votes against the plan.

December 6, 2010         Permalink

ON LEAVING VIRGINIA – AT 8:05 A.M. ET:  We return to New York today from central Virginia.  Some observations:

Regular gasoline down here is about $2.89 a gallon.  In White Plains, New York, it's about $3.25.  One station near us charges $3.47, but they throw in clerks who can't speak English.  You pay for benefits.

The difference in price is symbolic.  People are leaving New York in droves because of inflated living costs, high taxes, and poor services.  We find the spirit here in Virginia far higher.  Employees of stores are endlessly courteous, and knowledgeable.  There are major stores in New York where you can't even find an employee.

In New York there is a constant sense of looming doom.  Everyone knows the state is almost bankrupt.  Yet, people see billions being made once more on Wall Street.  The contrast is enraging.  Apartments in Manhattan are selling in the millions while the state goes under, and small businesses close. 

Virginia is a conservatively run state.  New York is liberal wild.  Do you think there's a lesson here?

And yet, Virginians and other Americans will, in all probability, be asked to bail out New York and California, and will be told that those states are "too big to fail."  Advice to Virginians:  Just say no. 

December 6, 2010       Permalink

WHAT ILLEGAL LEAKS CAUSE – AT 7:48 A.M. ET:  We don't normally quote Britain's fashionably left newspaper, the Independent, but this story seems well reported, and reflects information that I've seen from other sources as well.  Worth reading:

Battered by a scandal which seems to provide a fresh wave of embarrassment with each passing day, the US government is being forced to undertake a major reshuffle of the embassy staff, military personnel and intelligence operatives whose work has been laid bare by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks.

The Obama administration was yesterday facing a crisis in its diplomatic service, amid growing evidence that the ongoing publication of a tranche of supposedly-confidential communiqués will make normal work difficult, if not dangerous, for important State Department employees across the world.

A mere 1,100 of the roughly 250,000 secret documents obtained by the website have so far been published, leading to fears that the unhelpful revelations will continue for months to come, destabilising US relations with almost all of its key allies and inflaming tensions with already-hostile governments in the Middle East and beyond. "In the short run, we're almost out of business," a senior US diplomat told the Reuters news agency, saying it could take five years to rebuild trust. "It is really, really bad. I cannot exaggerate it. In all honesty, nobody wants to talk to us ... Some people still have to, particularly (in) government but ... they are already asking us things like, 'Are you going to write about this?'"

COMMENT:  I hope The New York Times is proud of itself.  I'd imagine that in trendy journalism schools all over the country, instructors are telling their students what a great moment in journalism this is.  Ah yes, just like the Pentagon Papers leak during Vietnam.

But the leak of the Pentagon Papers was small change compared to WikiLeaks, which has done untold damage to American diplomacy and defense.

Several observers have noted that it is highly unlikely that the Army Pfc charged with aiding WikiLeaks was responsible for all the leaking.  He must have had help.  There is informed speculation that much higher individuals fed some of the material either to him, or to WikiLeaks directly.

And yet, the indifference of official Washington to what has happened continues to astound us.  Even Republicans appear far too casual about the damage.  Major investigations are called for.  We will expect them to begin when the new, Republican-controlled House takes over in January.  If Republicans fail in this, they are not capable of governing.

People will be killed because of these leaks.  American interests will be set back.  The war on global terror will be compromised.  Anyone care?

December 6, 2010       Permalink

ERIC HOLDER, CALL YOUR OFFICE – AT 7:35 A.M. ET:  There's been a new development in the Obama administration's disgraceful handling of the Black Panther voter intimidation case.  You'll recall that members of the Black Panthers were originally charged with intimidating voters at polling places in Philadelphia in 2008.  Despite overwhelming evidence of guilt, the case was dropped by the Obama Justice Department.  From AP:

WASHINGTON – The conservative-dominated U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has published a report criticizing the Justice Department for its handling of voting rights accusations against the New Black Panther Party.

The report has been published on the commission's website. It says the department has failed to cooperate with the investigation and left open the question of whether political interference played a role in limiting action against the New Black Panther Party.

Two lawyers who formerly worked in the department's Voting Rights section have described hostility from senior officials and career attorneys to pursuing Voting Rights Act accusations against minorities who harass white voters.

The department has repeatedly denied that race played any role in its handling of the 2008 incident in Philadelphia.

The department investigated complaints that New Black Panther Party leaders King Samir Shabazz and Jerry Jackson intimidated white voters at a Philadelphia polling place. A criminal investigation into the episode was dropped by the Bush administration, but the Justice Department under Obama obtained a narrower civil court order against the conduct than Bush officials sought.

Evidence obtained by the commission puts the department's "version of events into serious doubt," says the report. It relies heavily on the testimony of former Voting Rights lawyers Christopher Coates and J. Christian Adams.

COMMENT:  Of course, the AP spins the story to put the "blame" on conservative members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, as if this were strictly a partisan affair.  But no amount of spin can cover up the politicization of the Justice Department under Eric Holder.  This case, equivalent to cases of black voters intimidated in previous decades, should have gone forward to prosecution and conviction, if anything to show that the Justice Department is race neutral.

Don't expect the mainstream media to do much with this report.

December 6, 2010      Permalink

OBAMA'S WORST ENEMIES ARE HIS FRIENDS – AT 7:20 A.M. ET:  Each party has its kamikaze wing, but the Democratic versions are flying high and heading right for the USS White House.  From Fox:

President Obama's failure to stand his ground in ongoing negotiations with Republicans on key issues from taxes to jobless benefits has stirred howls of protest from many of his supporters on the left who are beginning to question the president's leadership skills.

Supporters say Obama should have been able to close the deal by now on extending the Bush tax cuts for only middle- and lower-income households and renewing another round of unemployment insurance.

Instead, Obama continues to extend his hand to Republican leaders who have made clear that any compromises with the White House on spending and tax cuts would have to be on their terms.

One liberal group, the Progressive Change Committee, is circulating a petition telling Obama that "Americans want him to fight the Bush tax cuts for millionaires – and that Democrats will keep losing if he keeps caving."

And get this:

Obama further enraged his supporters when he announced this week he wanted Congress to freeze the pay of civilian federal government employees as a step toward cutting the huge U.S. budget deficit. The unions have vowed to fight the proposal and Democrats have called it short-sighted.

Yup.  On the far Democratic left they really believe that even higher federal salaries are just what the public wants.

No doubt Mr. Obama is a weak personality.  He's Jimmah Carter with a bit more eloquence.  But the far left is doing to him what it did, successfully, to Lyndon Johnson in 1968. 

Only 20% of Americans now identify themselves as liberals.  And yet, the dedicated liberals believe they can win elections on their radical beliefs alone.  No doubt they're aided in this illusion by the editorial policies of newspapers like The New York Times, which believes all America lives on Manhattan's West Side, and by the fact that the survivors of last month's electoral massacre were primarily liberal Democrats in safe districts. 

We should look at the Democrats, and learn.  For there are some Republicans on the fringe right who think exactly the way the ideological liberals think.  They'll have about as much success in this fundamentally centrist nation.

December 6, 2010     Permalink

DECEMBER 5,  2010

I NEVER WOULD HAVE SUSPECTED – AT 10:37 P.M. ET:  You know, when most of us add two and two, we come up with four.  This formula does not seem to apply to much of mainstream journalism, which has, apparently, great difficulty figuring out simple things...unless informed by a leak.

The New York Times reports the "news" today, gleaned from Wikileaks, that Washington is having problems with Arab states that allow the funding of terrorists.  I am so shocked:

WASHINGTON — Nine years after the United States vowed to shut down the money pipeline that finances terrorism, senior Obama administration officials say they believe that many millions of dollars are flowing largely unimpeded to extremist groups worldwide, and they have grown frustrated by frequent resistance from allies in the Middle East, according to secret diplomatic dispatches.

Allies?

While American officials have publicly been relatively upbeat about their progress in disrupting terrorist financing, the internal State Department cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to several news organizations, offer a more pessimistic account, with blunt assessments of the threats to the United States from money flowing to militants affiliated with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas, Lashkar-e-Taiba and other groups.

Those bad boys.  And we thought they were so decent.  After all, isn't that what Middle East Studies departments in our colleges teach to our kids?

A classified memo sent by Mrs. Clinton last December made it clear that residents of Saudi Arabia and its neighbors, all allies of the United States, are the chief financial supporters of many extremist activities. “It has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority,” the cable said, concluding that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”

Maybe the fashion plates of the liberal press, long obsesssed with the "Israel lobby," will now spend a bit of their yoga time probing the vast Saudi lobby in the United States, which has tens of millions of dollars to spend each year polishing the Saudi image and rewarding friends with lavish gifts. 

The dispatch and others offered similarly grim views about the United Arab Emirates (“a strategic gap” that terrorists can exploit), Qatar (“the worst in the region” on counterterrorism) and Kuwait (“a key transit point”). The cable stressed the need to “generate the political will necessary” to block money to terrorist networks — groups that she said were “threatening stability in Pakistan and Afghanistan and targeting coalition soldiers.”

COMMENT:  All those warm friends.  How can anyone think ill of them?  And how much did it cost us to "liberate" Kuwait in the first Gulf War? 

Our country has done a great deal for the Muslim world, and some of it has involved bloodshed.  An occasional thank you would be nice.  It would be even nicer if some of those countries helped us end the money flow to the suicide bombers and other scholars.

But why did it take an illegal leak to inform us of what common sense tells us has been happening all along?

December 5, 2010      Permalink

ANOTHER FINANCIAL CRISIS? – AT 10:55 A.M. ET:  There is another, looming financial crisis, this time in the states.  State governments are literally failing, especially in the profligate, liberal states.  Warnings are being sounded.  From The New York Times:

The State of Illinois is still paying off billions in bills that it got from schools and social service providers last year. Arizona recently stopped paying for certain organ transplants for people in its Medicaid program. States are releasing prisoners early, more to cut expenses than to reward good behavior. And in Newark, the city laid off 13 percent of its police officers last week.

While next year could be even worse, there are bigger, longer-term risks, financial analysts say. Their fear is that even when the economy recovers, the shortfalls will not disappear, because many state and local governments have so much debt — several trillion dollars’ worth, with much of it off the books and largely hidden from view — that it could overwhelm them in the next few years.

“It seems to me that crying wolf is probably a good thing to do at this point,” said Felix Rohatyn, the financier who helped save New York City from bankruptcy in the 1970s.

If Rohatyn is worried, we should all be worried.  He's one of the smartest financiers around, and a reasonable guy.  He doesn't cry wolf easily.

It is the long-term problems of a handful of states, including California, Illinois, New Jersey and New York, that financial analysts worry about most, fearing that their problems might precipitate a crisis that could hurt other states by driving up their borrowing costs.

COMMENT:  Those "progressive" chickens are coming home to roost.  Rohatyn says he doesn't see where all this ends.  States may well come to Washington for a bailout, almost a mission impossible in the current climate.

New York is already the largest out-migration state in the nation.  More people leave New York each year than any other state.  California is facing outmigration of some of its most talented people.  Citizens vote with moving vans.  Who wants to live in a failing state?  Indiana, here we come.

December 5, 2010       Permalink

OH, JUICY – AT 10:40 A.M. ET:  The British spy scandals are the best, aren't they?  They're so much more intriguing than our bland, routine scandals.  There's a new one, and the usual statements are being issued.  From London's Telegraph: 

Katia Zatuliveter, a researcher for an MP on the influential defence select committee, is to be expelled from Britain after being questioned on suspicion of espionage by security services.

How did she get to such an influential committee?

Mr Hancock has recently asked sensitive questions in Parliament about the quantities of radioactive materials held by the country and the future of its nuclear deterrent.

Miss Zatuliveter has also worked for a defence think-tank and written articles that criticised Nato while defending military action by Russia.

And no one noticed?  Check out the photo with the story.  All good spy scandals have pretty girls?  Who have we had?  The Walker family?  Aldrich Ames?  Shame on us.

However Mr Hancock, the Lib Dem member for Portsmouth South, denied she was a sleeper agent for Moscow and insisted the authorities had never raised their concerns with him.

Considering the next paragraph, we can understand why they'd never trust him.

Mr Hancock, who is presently on police bail over an alleged indecent assault against a female constituent, said: “She is not a Russian spy. I know nothing about espionage, but she has been subjected to a deportation order.

"She is appealing it, because she feels - quite rightly - that she has done nothing wrong."

COMMENT:  So, we have a member of Parliament on police bail for a sex charge, and an employee who poses on beaches in a bikini and grass skirt, and who writes loving articles about Russian military adventures.

Start casting the movie.  James Bond, we need you.

December 5, 2010        Permalink

MORE ON TAXES – AT 10:21 A.M. ET:  The signs of some compromise on extending the Bush tax cuts are taking shape, with some public negotiating taking place on interview shows.  But beware the monkey wrench.  Some in each party are ready to throw it.  From The Politico:

Negotiating over the extension of Bush-era tax cuts played out live on the TV talks shows Sunday, with Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) saying he favors permanent extension of the tax cuts but would accept two years and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) calling for a one-year extension.

"We're going to have to kick it over" for two years," Hatch said on CNN's "State of the Union." He said Republicans would agree to extend the expiring tax cuts and expired unemployment insurance payments as part of that deal, but would not be willing to add in any other sweeteners for Democrats. "Beyond that, then I think things break down," he said.

Hatch, however, also said it would be "disastrous" for Congress to leave town without a deal - allowing the higher, Clinton-era tax rates to return.

"I'd be willing to go along with a one-year extension," Wyden said. "Washington is all driven by a culture of procrastination," he said in explaining why he opposes a longer extension.

COMMENT:  We've echoed Hatch's logic here.  It would indeed be disastrous for Congress to leave town without deciding the tax issue.  The uncertainty would damage the economy still further.

And, yes, with all the faults inherent in the system, the GOP should go along with an extension of unemployment benefits.  There is, no doubt, plenty of cheating and manipulating in the unemployment insurance system, but there is also plenty of legitimate need.  We have 9.8 percent unemployment, and a much higher rate of underemployment.  Ronald Reagan often spoke of the need for a social safety net.  As a governor, he'd seen it work.  I think Hatch's stand is correct.  Agree to the extension of benefits, but not to any other Democratic programs that the libs will try to sneak into a tax bill.

December 5, 2010     Permalink