Moving At The Speed of Light and Arrogantly!

One of the great impending tragedies of this presidency is his apparent arrogant belief he has all the answers and must move swiftly on top of that. Well he does not have all the answers and the sooner he learns the better off we and the world will be.

Even the London Times is beginning to have serious doubts but I am not holding my breath. (See 1,1a and 1b below.)

They were warned, did not heed the warning and now deny they were. The press and media have covered for them and continue to do so. (See 2 below.)

Charles Krauthammer on Obama's European Budget. (See 3b below.)

Like 'Eve,' Matt Welch sees more than one face regarding Obama. (See 4 below.)

More about Mexico's free fall. (See 5 below.)

'The mother of all budgets' according to Andrew Leonard. (See 6 below.)

A quick look at Obama's policies towards Israel:

a) executive order to allow Palestinians to immigrate.

b) Budget request for $900 million to rebuild Gaza. Charity for terrorists at tax payer expense. No quid pro quo.

c) Appointment of Charles Freeman to filter Middle East reports. Obama's appoinment of Freeman, an anti-Israel, pro China apologist, either signifies a turn, naivety or both - possibly even another example of foreign policy stupidity.

d) Belief Iran will willingly renounce its nuclear weapons development.

The more this administration stacks the deck against Israel, Netanyahu and his efforts to build a unity coalition, while giving Iran a pass, the more Israel will feel isolated and thus the more Israel will be compelled to act in its own interest sans what America or the West may think or wish otherwise.

Again I would urge you to read Norman Podhoretz's "WW 4." and see the documentary "The Case for Israel: Democracy's Outpost" by Prof. Alan Dershowitz. (See 7 below.)

The GOP's dilemma.

Like it or not it is important to have a politically effective counter weight to arrogant run-away and self-imbued leadership. Therefore, it is important for the GOP to get its act together, develop some broad principles that are sound for the nation and go out and sell them because they would be just that: sound and practical.

To accomplish this will require an internal struggle and the elimination of some stuck in the mud old faces that have lost their appeal as well as their senses. Can the GOP do this in time for the mid-year's? Stay tuned. (See 8 below.)

Have a great weekend.

Dick


1) The era of big government arrives

In the middle of his presidency, Bill Clinton boldly pronounced the era of big government over. Many Americans didn't believe him, and events over the last decade have verified the doubts.

The federal government is bigger, costlier and more involved than ever in Americans' lives, including, under the previous Republican administration, a huge new government prescription plan, war spending and more government surveillance powers. But unprecedented growth has come in the last four months through trillion-dollar-plus spending, tax cuts and debt to bail out banks, automakers and homeowners behind on their mortgages.

It may take Americans years to comprehend the magnitude of the change.

That is why the most important part of President Barack Obama's speech Tuesday night to a joint session of Congress was not in the details of his plans for the economy, health care or education, or even in the optimistic tone he tried to strike after being criticized for "talking down" the economy.

The crux came in Obama's assertion that the time for big government is now — even as he disavowed it in concept.

Over the next four years, the effect of his plan will determine whether Obama's election last fall was the beginning of liberalism's ascent, or whether it refueled a conservative resurgence in American politics.

It may take Americans awhile to get their heads around the concept of the federal government — whose efficiency and necessity have been under attack since the 1970s — as the savior of failed private industry and business.

If the economy turns and the people credit Obama's bold, big-government solutions, Democrats could be in control for a long time. But if Obama's plan does not create or save 3.5 million jobs as he has promised, future generations could be sentenced to a lower standard of living, and the political fallout will be stuck to the Democrats for a long time.

In his speech to Congress, Obama gave a standard caveat. This is necessary big government, Obama said, when he explained why the first trillion dollars of debt will not be enough.

"Not because I believe in bigger government — I don't," Obama said. "Not because I'm not mindful of the massive debt we've inherited — I am. I called for action because the failure to do so would have cost more jobs and cost more hardships."

Obama's $787 billion stimulus package of tax cuts and government spending is one of the earliest and easily the largest markers of any new president.

Ronald Reagan did not push signature tax cuts through until after he survived an assassination attempt two months into his presidency. George W. Bush's tax cuts came in the placid summer of his first year in office. Clinton's health-care initiative was dead on arrival.

The great Obama paradox is that he has continued to talk of bipartisanship while presiding over a sharply partisan first month in Washington. His stimulus plan passed with only three Republican senators and no Republican House members on board. There may be more opportunity for bipartisanship on health care reform, but Obama's down payment of $600 billion-plus toward that end is not likely to bring along many conservatives.

Adrift and disillusioned after getting smacked in the November elections, conservatives have a rallying point. To them, Obama has always been a big government liberal. Only now he gets to be that way for national necessity.

If you want to make a conservative apoplectic, compare Obama's communications skills to Ronald Reagan's

"Obama is not Reaganesque," talk-show king Rush Limbaugh said, accusing Obama of capitalizing on despair to move the U.S. toward socialism. "He is Big Brotheresque. He is Orwellian."

1a) 'Fast Break' Obama
By Howard Fineman

Moving at the speed of light, the new president aims to score early victories, and keep critics on their toes.


The president is moving so fast, so sweepingly, that we may as well call him "Fast Break" Obama. For several reasons—the urgency of the economic crisis, a backlog of frustrated Democratic dreams and his own shrewd strategic sense—he's racing up the basketball court of American public life at a furious pace.

Obama wants to pile up a crushing lead on the scoreboard early in the game—when his popularity is high and he can still lay all the blame on his predecessor—and hope that the resulting momentum will impress the world (he goes to Europe for the G-8 in April), reluctant global investors (the sovereign wealth funds are sitting on trillions) and, of course, American voters and consumers.

The guy appears laid back, and he can be patient when he has to be, but right now he believes in motion—lots of it. If you move fast enough, he also knows, people don't have time to flyspeck details—and some of the details in his new budget, the outlines of which he released Thursday, are either squishy, controversial or both. There are literally hundreds of things in the budget to focus on, but I will pick out just three:

1. War Arithmetic. In a clever bit of budget making, Obama is taking advantage of George W. Bush's dishonesty to make his own budget look better. The former president's administration never counted spending on Iraq and Afghanistan in the regular budget it sent to Congress. By taking the hit early, and including that spending—now roughly $140 billion a year—Obama will be able to claim major savings down the road. In 2011 and 2012, that spending is slated to decline to $50 billion a year. So Obama and his budget crew can book savings of $180 billion—assuming, of course, that Obama is in fact able to wind down those wars.

2. Rosy Scenario. The simplest way to make the future look good is to assume that it will be. That is what Obama's budget does. Independent experts, on the Hill and in the private sector, are predicting that economic growth in 2010 will be (to average their estimates) about 1.7 percent. The president is assuming that growth will be nearly double that number. The rosier outlook allows Budget Director Peter Orszag to pencil in much smaller spending numbers for things such as unemployment insurance, and larger ones for receipts from income and employment taxes. Bottom line: much smaller deficits in the famous "out years."

3. Taxing Carbon. The "cap-and-trade" concept originated in the world of environmentalism, but it has dawned on federal officials and politicians that it's potentially a colossal source of tax revenue. Lord knows we have more air pollution than we know what to do with, so why not tax the heck out of those who produce it? Specifically, the scheme would tax carbon emissions by the pound, and allow polluters to trade the "right" to pollute by paying taxes. The original aim was to encourage electric utilities to develop new, non-carbon technologies, on the theory that if they didn't need the "carbon credits," they could sell them to those who still do. Obama is hoping to raise $79 billion in 2012 by implanting this system.

For now, all the money is supposed to go into technological research, and into compensating low-income customers of utilities that will try to pass on the cost of the tax. But the budget makers know that if they establish the new system, it could eventually yield hundreds of billions a year—and there is no guarantee that the $79 billion, if it materializes, will indeed all be spent on environmental matters.

Still, there is no guarantee that any of this will happen at all. In the heartland of America—places where they cling to their guns and their religion—they burn coal. Lots of coal. If Obama and the Democrats push this plan, a regional war will erupt. It will be ugly and it won't shape up along party lines. It's not a source of revenue Orszag should count on—at least not just yet—especially if the president is expecting to have an easy time winning Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania in 2012.

1b) Obama Stumbles

Barack Obama is a gifted orator, but barely a month into his Administration there are worrying doubts about whether his governing style is as eloquent
Nobody who heard him addressing a joint session of the House and Senate on Tuesday could doubt that Barack Obama can speak. This is a man who was born with a dais beneath his feet. But increasingly the question being asked of the new President is: can he manage?

It is a political commonplace that you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. But the sound of Mr Obama's prose has begun to jangle. “Now is the time,” he said lulling his congressional audience, “to act boldly and wisely - to not only revive this economy, but to build a new foundation for lasting prosperity.” The trouble is that this wasn't the first time that Mr Obama told Americans that “it's time to act”. Nobody doubts that now, in the teeth of the cruellest economic crisis in decades, it is time to act. But the world is still not clear what actions Mr Obama plans to take. What unnerves it even more is that when he has acted, his judgment has not always matched the sturdiness of his campaign rhetoric, let alone its slick, skilful execution. He has been ambushed in traps too often of his own making.

Yesterday Mr Obama was forced to introduce his third nominee for Commerce Secretary, the former Washington Governor Gary Locke, after his two previous candidates dropped out - the first, Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico, because of an investigation into possible corruption, and the second, Republican Senator Judd Gregg, from New Hampshire, over ideological differences. As for Tom Daschle, the President's nominee for Health Secretary, he had to bow out of a job in the White House to spend more time with his unpaid taxes: it was curious enough to have chosen a candidate with tax difficulties, curiouser still for Mr Obama to have assumed that his nominee's oversight would be brushed aside.

Mr Obama's has also been bruised by his inexperience with the ways of Wall Street. The President assiduously, and unwisely, stoked expectations for his Treasury Secretary's bank rescue plan. When the plan that Tim Geithner eventually unveiled turned out to be so lacking in details that, in Wall Street's eyes, it had as much substance as fog, stock markets duly plunged.

The Administration's selection of a new ambassador to Iraq has been little short of a farce. Having been wooed by the US Vice-President, the Secretary of State, and the National Security Adviser to be America's new man in Baghdad, General Anthony Zinni -America's former top commander in the Middle East - had naturally assumed that the paperwork would be just a formality. Joe Biden even called General Zinni to thank him for taking the job. Then the General's phone went silent. Later he discovered that the job had been handed to Christopher Hill, a veteran diplomat. When the Obama camp offered General Zinni the job of Ambassador to Saudi Arabia as a consolation prize, he said: “I told them to stick it where the sun don't shine.” General Zinni's fury was aroused less by the Administration's change of mind, than by its clumsiness. “No one even bothered to call me. This is Leadership 101.”

Government is an impatient judge. Although the President was sworn in only last month, his country already feels a little rattled. After the beguiling eloquence of his campaign, the Obama that Americans see in the White House looks less sure-footed.

Certainly, these are early days, and in extraordinary times. All administrations take a while to make appointments, and many stumble with the odd nomination along the way. Mr Obama will, for some time yet, be given the benefit of the doubt by the American people. There is no question that he is the Communicator in Chief. But Americans will judge him not only by his words, but also by his executive skill in translating these into swift and effective action.


2) This video clearly shows that George Bush tried to warn Congress starting in 2001, that this economic crisis was coming, if something was not done. But congress refused to listen, along with Congressman Barney Frank. This video says it all.
The media reportedly did not want this video on You Tube; it was taken off.
This link is of the same video but is routed through Canada.

Everyone in America needs to see this before it is yanked off the airwaves again!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMnSp4qEXNM&NR=1

3) Obama Wants a European Transformation
By Charles Krauthammer

Not a great speech, but extremely consequential. If Barack Obama succeeds, his joint address to Congress will be seen as historic -- indeed as the foundational document of Obamaism. As it stands, it constitutes the boldest social democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president.

The first part of the speech, justifying his economic stabilization efforts, was mere housekeeping. The economic crisis is to Obama a technocratic puzzle that needs to be solved because otherwise he loses all popular support.

Unlike most presidents, however, he doesn't covet popular support for its own sake. Some men become president to be someone, others to do something. This is what separates, say, a Ronald Reagan from a Bill Clinton. Obama, who once noted that Reagan altered the trajectory of America as Clinton had not, sees himself a Reagan.

Reagan came to office to do something: shrink government, lower taxes, rebuild American defenses. Obama made clear Tuesday night that he intends to be equally transformative. His three goals: universal health care, universal education, and a new green energy economy highly funded and regulated by government.

(1) Obama wants to be to universal health care what Lyndon Johnson was to Medicare. Obama has publicly abandoned his once-stated preference for a single-payer system as in Canada and Britain. But that is for practical reasons. In America, you can't get there from here directly.

Instead, Obama will create the middle step that will lead ultimately and inevitably to single-payer. The way to do it is to establish a reformed system that retains a private health-insurance sector but offers a new government-run plan (based on benefits open to members of Congress) so relatively attractive that people voluntarily move out of the private sector, thereby starving it. The ultimate result is a system of fully socialized medicine. This will likely not happen until long after Obama leaves office. But he will be rightly recognized as its father.

(2) Beyond cradle-to-grave health care, Obama wants cradle-to-cubicle education. He wants far more government grants, tax credits and other financial guarantees for college education -- another way station to another universal federal entitlement. He lauded the country for establishing free high school education during the Industrial Revolution; he wants to put us on the road to doing the same for college during the Information Age.

(3) Obama wants to be to green energy what John Kennedy was to the moon shot, its visionary and creator. It starts with the establishment of a government-guided, government-funded green energy sector into which the administration will pour billions of dollars from the stimulus package and billions more from budgets to come.

But just picking winners and losers is hardly sufficient for a president who sees himself as world-historical. Hence the carbon cap-and-trade system he proposed Tuesday night that will massively restructure American industry and create a highly regulated energy sector.

These revolutions in health care, education and energy are not just abstract hopes. They have already taken life in Obama's massive $787 billion stimulus package, a huge expansion of social spending constituting a down payment on Obama's plan for remaking the American social contract.

Obama sees the current economic crisis as an opportunity. He has said so openly. And now we know what opportunity he wants to seize. Just as the Depression created the political and psychological conditions for Franklin Roosevelt's transformation of America from laissez-faireism to the beginnings of the welfare state, the current crisis gives Obama the political space to move the still (relatively) modest American welfare state toward European-style social democracy.

In the European Union, government spending has declined slightly, from 48 percent to 47 percent of GDP during the last 10 years. In the U.S., it has shot up from 34 percent to 40 percent. Part of this explosive growth in U.S. government spending reflects the emergency private-sector interventions of a Republican administration. But the clear intent was to make the massive intrusion into the private sector temporary and to retreat as quickly as possible. Obama has radically different ambitions.

The spread between Europe and America in government-controlled GDP has already shrunk from 14 percent to 7 percent. Two terms of Obamaism and the difference will be zero.

Conservatives take a dim view of the regulation-bound, economically sclerotic, socially stagnant, nanny state that is the European Union. Nonetheless, Obama is ascendant and has the personal mandate to take the country where he wishes. He has laid out boldly the Brussels-bound path he wants to take.

Let the debate begin.



4)The Two Faces of Barack Obama: A president contradicts himself all night long
By Matt Welch

"But I also know," President Barack Obama said last night, in his typically self-referential fashion, "that in a time of crisis, we cannot afford to govern out of anger, or yield to the politics of the moment. My job—our job—is to solve the problem. Our job is to govern with a sense of responsibility."

It was a pleasingly presidential sentiment for a subdued, not-quite-a-State-of-the-Union speech. Unfortunately for Obama—and us—it was also contradicted, and blatantly so, not four paragraphs prior, by a guy named Barack Obama. "This time," the president warned us the minute before, while giving that stern schoolmaster look of his, "CEOs won't be able to use taxpayer money to pad their paychecks or buy fancy drapes or disappear on a private jet. Those days are over!" Democrats leaped to their feet.

Obama aims to be the president of all Americans, a position that appears to be sincere. But I wonder whether in the process he might also want to consider appointing himself chief executive of his own head. All night long, with equally sonorous vigor, he served up confident assertions, only to state moments later, with equal conviction, their near opposite.

"We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before," Obama crowd-pleased near the beginning, in the slot normally reserved for lines like "the state of our union is strong." Not long after, though, Americans learned that our very "survival depends on finding new sources of energy." Also, "there will be no real recovery unless we clean up the credit crisis...our recovery will be choked off before it even begins," and if we don't do whatever Obama wants us to do about the banking system, "it could result in an economy that sputters along for not months or years, but perhaps a decade." Better! Stronger! Crippled for a decade!

After detailing some clean-energy advancements in China, Germany, Japan, and Korea, the president averred, "Well, I do not accept"—there's that self-referencing again—"a future where the jobs and industries of tomorrow take root beyond our borders." A few paragraphs later, however, zero-sum gave way to kumbaya: "The world depends on us to have a strong economy, just as our economy depends on the strength of the world's." Just don't you get strong by producing clean energy, Koreans!

It was like this all night. The president's stimulus package "will save or create 3.5 million jobs." One of those, anyway! His administration has "created a new website called recovery.gov so that every American can find out how and where their money is being spent," unless they try to use it to find out how and where their money is being spent. Importantly, Obama vowed to "act with the full force of the federal government to ensure that the major banks that Americans depend on have enough confidence and enough money to lend even in more difficult times," a pledge he took so seriously that later on he stressed, twice, that "it's not about helping banks—it's about helping people."

The contradictions came flying even in his read-my-lips moment: "If your family earns less than $250,000 a year," he said, "you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime." But as recently as the previous paragraph the president vowed to "restore a sense of fairness and balance to our tax code by finally ending the tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas." And a few paragraphs before that, he called for a "market-based cap on carbon pollution." So: You will not see your federal taxes increased a single dime...unless you own a company that emits carbon or hires some of those dastardly Koreans.

The two faces of Obama reveal more than just a man hard-wired to work both sides of a room. There is an essential contradiction at the heart of his populist economics. He wants to jump-start the "flow of credit"—it's "the lifeblood of our economy," after all—but somehow surgically remove the "speculators" from the process. "I will not spend a single penny," he promised, undeliverably, last night, "for the purpose of rewarding a single Wall Street executive, but I will do whatever it takes to help the small business that can't pay its workers or the family that has saved and still can't get a mortgage." His press secretary, Robert Gibbs, declared last week that, "I think we left [behind] a few months ago the adage that if it was good for a derivatives trader, that it's good for Main Street. I think the verdict is in on that."

Here is one of the many problems with that line of thinking: Wall Street isn't just some abstract pit of snakes that can be drowned in poison oil or otherwise given a wide berth—it's the heart (if tattered) of the country's financial industry. Which, among other things, does more to unleash the lifebloody "flow of credit" than any other power center in America. Not only does Obama get it wrong when he thinks you can best "help the small business" without involving the best single source of small-business funding, he also wildly misses the political and financial ethos of the abstraction he can't stop campaigning against. "I understand that on any given day, Wall Street may be more comforted by an approach that gives banks bailouts with no strings attached, and that holds nobody accountable for their reckless decisions," he said with a smirk. "But such an approach won't solve the problem." Nor will erecting a giant straw man in Lower Manhattan.

But there's more: Not only is Wall Street going to be key to any recovery, the reviled "derivatives trader" is right at the clenched heart of the financial blockage. As Washington Post economics columnist Robert J. Samuelson pointed out earlier this month, "Contrary to popular wisdom, banks—institutions that take deposits—aren't the main problem. In December, total U.S. bank credit stood at $9.95 trillion, up 8 percent from a year earlier, reports the Federal Reserve. Business, consumer and real estate loans all increased....The real collapse has occurred in securities markets."

Securitized lending instruments, and the various insurance and pricing bets placed on them, sloshed hundreds of billions of dollars into the economy, but have now locked up. The point is not that the derivatives trader needs a bailout—he most certainly does not—it's that inaccurately demonizing him is not the shortest route to economic wisdom.

There were some promising notes in Obama's speech last night, particularly his vow to "end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don't need them," and discontinue the dishonest and irresponsible way that Congress has funded wars for the past seven years. But the biggest promise was the one that his contradictions—or maybe just his ideology—did not let him fulfill. "It is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment," he said near the beginning, "that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament." Too true. Moments later, however, despite piles of evidence to the contrary, he said: "Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market."

If understanding root causes is the key to good economic policy, we may have longer to go than even the pessimistic half of Obama thinks.

5) Mexico Is in Free Fall
By David Rieff

Shortly before the US elections last November, then vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden was widely criticised for predicting that an Obama administration would almost certainly be tested by what he called a "generated" international crisis, in much the way that the Soviet Union "tested" John F. Kennedy shortly after he assumed office. Biden did not point to a specific region of the world, but mentioned the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and Russia as the likeliest sources of trouble for the new president.

Impolitic or not, Biden's anxieties seem to have informed several of the administration's early foreign policy decisions. These include his own extension of an olive branch to Russia at the recent Munich security conference, and Barack Obama's appointment of Richard Holbrooke as special envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan – and of George Mitchell to a similar post for Israel-Palestine.

But, as pressing as the Middle East, south Asia, and Russia (as well as Iran and North Korea) are, another crisis far closer to home could create as much peril as a nuclear-armed Iran, an aggressively resurgent Russia, or even an Islamist-dominated Pakistan.

That crisis is located in Mexico, which is in free fall, its state institutions under threat as they have not been since at least the Cristero uprising of the late 1920s and possibly since the Mexican revolution of 1910. While the Obama administration is obviously aware of what is happening south of the Rio Grande, the threat simply does not command the attention that its gravity requires.

The crisis consists in nothing less than an effort by the major drug cartels to tame and suborn the Mexican state, and not just in the strip along the US border, though the epicentre of the crisis is there. Obviously, the cartels' leaders do not have designs on Mexico's presidential palace. But, through a policy of terror extending from Oaxaca in the south, through Acapulco on the Pacific coast, and up to the great border cities of Tijuana and Juarez (Mexico's sixth and seventh most populous cities, respectively), they have made it abundantly clear that they are trying to achieve impunity.

The only recent parallel in Latin America was a similar effort 15 years ago by the Colombian drug cartels. That disguised coup failed – barely – and there is no guarantee that the result will be similar this time around in Mexico.

Journalists with long experience of war zones report being more worried about their safety in Mexico border than when they were in Bosnia, Afghanistan, or Iraq, though much of the violence is internecine. Of the thousands who have been killed, often after being horribly tortured, many, if not most, have been members of the drug cartels and their families.

But it is the campaign of targeted assassination against any Mexican official who seems to pose a serious threat to the cartels' operations that makes the crisis so dire. First, in May 2007, the cartels killed Jose Nemesio Lugo Felix, the general co-ordinator of information at the national centre for planning and analysis to combat organised crime. Soon after, a hitman murdered Edgar Milan Gomez, Mexico's highest ranking federal police official.

In November, 2008, a plane carrying Juan Camilo Mourino, Mexico's national security adviser, crashed under mysterious circumstances. And very recently, the retired General Mauro Enrique Tello Quinones, one of the most decorated officers in the Mexican army, was abducted, tortured, and killed less than a week after assuming a new position as anti-drug chief in the resort city of Cancún.

For all the lip service paid to relations with Mexico (and, indeed, with Latin America more generally) from Franklin D Roosevelt to Obama, the truth is that developments in Mexico have always had short shrift from US presidents. Illegal immigration is a major issue, to be sure, as is the drug trade. But the US government has always regarded them as domestic American issues rather than as crucial foreign policy concerns.

It is emblematic that while Obama has received Mexican President Felipe Calderón, the White House only recently announced that one of his first foreign trips would be to Mexico. And incoming secretary of state Hillary Clinton was asked almost nothing about Mexico at her confirmation hearing, and she emphasised relations with Mexico neither in her own statement nor in those she has made since assuming her post.

Indeed, the conventional wisdom in the US is that Mexico policy regarding illegal immigration and drugs will be the province of the new homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano (herself a former border state governor). Meanwhile, the treasury and commerce departments will be handle trade policy concerning Nafta, the North American Free Trade Agreement.

This is the way Mexico policy has been run for decades. And, offensive as this has been to Mexican sensibilities – and harmful to finding long-term solutions to America's immigration dilemma – these complacent arrangements have never presented so clear and present danger as they do today.

6) The mother of all budgets

Any progressive who, after reviewing the White House's proposed budget, still thinks that President Barack Obama is aiming too low or hewing too close to the middle needs to seriously consider some aggressive psychotherapy. We haven't witnessed as ambitious a forward-looking agenda in a generation.

Republicans will call it big-spending. They will be correct. The $3.6 trillion budget includes a $1.75 trillion deficit for 2009 -- representing a whopping 12.3 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. As the Wall Street Journal notes, that is "a level not seen since 1942 as the U.S. plunged into World War II."

Republicans will call it class warfare. They will be correct. This budget will tax the rich and big business for the benefit of the rest of the population. Hedge fund managers will get hit hard, and U.S. based multinationals will lose tax breaks on overseas earnings. It is a profound reversal of the last 30 years of government policy. But Republicans have no one to blame but themselves. If you cut taxes on the rich and then the rich drive the economy into a ditch, your position of moral superiority becomes shaky.

The new budget includes a cap-and-trade program, significant health-care reform, big boosts for education, another cool $250 billion in reserve for more banking system stabilization, and a one-billion-a-year high-speed-rail grant program. Just for starters.

The size, goals, and funding strategies for the new budget ensure a political battle of monstrous proportions. And in retrospect, it clarifies the Obama administration's strategy on the stimulus package. Suppose the administration had pushed for a much bigger stimulus package, along the lines of what some progressives were arguing for. Many progressives actively wanted to provoke a Republican filibuster, as a show of strength and an opportunity to shame the GOP publicly as obstructionists. But why provoke that kind of fight in your first weeks of office, if what you've got in your back pocket is a budget proposal bigger, more expensive, and more fundamentally transformative of the United States' economy than anything proposed by a Democrat or Republican since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society?

The White House was saving its bullets for the real fight. And it is on.

7) U.S. at Durban II: A Dangerous Game to Lose
By Peggy Shapiro

Would President Obama attend or send a U.S. delegate to a Klu Klux Klan planning meeting with the hopes of changing its agenda? That would be outrageous. Then why did the administration announce late last Saturday night that the U.S. is joining the planning sessions for the next U.N. Conference on Racism, known as Durban II, or the International Israel Hate-fest? The President is making conference calls to Jewish leaders to convince them that the two scenarios are not morally identical, but they are.

Durban I was a stage for anti-Semitism and vitriolic condemnation of Israel and Israel alone. No other country was chastised for acts of racism, not even Darfur, where the genocide continues. Israel was the only country which was criticized and the criticism included even its right to exist as a Jewish nation. Although the Durban Declaration makes no reference to the many countries which are now or are becoming Muslim, it calls a homeland for the Jewish people as "racist" by definition. Congress called the conference a forum for "attacking Israel, promoting anti-Semitism, and undermining the Universal Declaration of Human Rights." (H.Res. 1361) The anti-Semitism was so flagrant that Colin Powell led a walk out and the U.S. has voted against all U.N. measures which contain elements of the Durban Declaration.

What will make Durban II any better? Nothing. The State Department equivocates that it will engage in the preparation stages of the conference and perhaps not the conference itself, yet all U.N. nations who attend the preparatory meetings have agreed to "reaffirm the Durban Declaration". U.S. participation cannot change the objective of Durban II, which is "to foster the implementation of the Durban Declaration and Program of Action." It is a done deal. When the European Union attempted to remove some incendiary paragraphs against Israel, Pakistan replied that those paragraphs were going to remain since they were part of the first Durban Declaration and Program of Action. "May I remind - we are not here to renegotiate the Durban Declaration and it is already there; we are at the Review Conference and we cannot renegotiate." Plans for Durbin II have been underway for several years, and a last minute proposal by the U.S. may, at best, remove one or two inflammatory passages but not the core purpose of the event: promoting anti-Semitism.

Durbin II is likely to be worse than Durbin I. Whereas the first conference developed into a orgy of hate speech, the next conference states on its official website that its mission is to "...accelerate progress towards the implementation of measures adopted in 2001." That is, Durban II is where words of hate towards Israel will be translated into actions. If there is any doubt about the motives of the conference, one needs to look at the preparatory committee, chaired by Libya and Iran, neither of which is likely to give up its goal of destroying the State of Israel.

U.S. participation in the planning of Durban II has no chance of removing the demonization of Israel as part of the fixed conference agenda just as having a chat with Klan leaders would not make that organization denounce racism. Moreover, U.S. participation sends the message that the U.S. is ready to negotiate its principles and abandon its most steadfast ally in the Middle East. U.S. participation also undermines other nations who were considering a boycott. Without U.S. cover, other democracies expose themselves to serious retaliation. And a president, who would not make himself available for a photo-op with a Klan leader, should not send a U.S. official to sit at a table with Libya, Iran and other despots whose positions are clearly stated in the Durban I documents. It lends credibility to their shameful pretense of combating racism.

Getting the Klu Klux Klan to renounce racism is an effort defeated before it begins. Yet any student of history knows that the U.S. is engaged in just such a losing game and that it has been played before. In September 1938, the major powers of Europe sat down at a conference in Munich with a notorious and very outspoken anti-Semite. The nation under discussion then was Czechoslovakia, and like Israel now, Czechoslovakia was left out of the decisions that determined it destiny. The western leaders betrayed their commitments to the Czechs and returned home gloriously waving the useless piece of paper that was the peace agreement. At that conference, the west lost. Western leaders disgraced themselves, empowered the anti-Semite and paved the way for World War II. If the U.S. participates in Durban II, we will lose the game and set the stage for some terrifying consequences.


8) The Republican Future: Three Choices
By Henry Olsen

The Republican base is mostly white evangelical Christians--vastly different than the coalition that Ronald Reagan inherited (and transformed) in 1980. The GOP must understand this fact in order to decide how to expand its coalition. Options for growth include appealing to the educated affluent, the working-class nonevangelical faithful, or minorities.


As conservatives gather this weekend for the first Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference since the 2008 debacle, they need to consider one fact as they contemplate rebuilding the movement and party. Understanding this fact will help them meet their political challenge.

The fact: 42% of John McCain's vote came from white evangelical or born-again Christians.

That's right: according to the exit poll, 26% of the electorate is white evangelicals, and 74% of them voted for McCain. McCain pulled slightly less than 46% of the vote, so about four-in-ten of McCain's voters were white evangelicals.

There are many ways to rebuild that majority by adapting Reagan's 1977 playbook to the modern playing field.

To put it in perspective, white evangelicals are nearly twice as important to Republicans as African-Americans are for Democrats. Despite the surge in African-American turnout and the record high percentage Obama received from those voters, blacks comprised only 23% of the winning coalition.
This documents what people have long suspected: the white evangelical community is now the Republican Party's base. And it creates the challenge all conservatives and Republicans need to answer, how to build a stable majority coalition by building on that base.

It's tempting to think one can throw that base away and start anew. But that's not how politics works. Every stable, new political coalition builds upon an existing party base rather than start from ground zero. Indeed, FDR's New Deal coalition did not reject the Solid South; he added Catholic and African-American voters from the GOP and built a majority that lasted nearly 40 years.

Ronald Reagan followed FDR's playbook. He did not reject the shrunken GOP base of the mid-1970s. Instead, in his landmark speech before the 1977 CPAC convention, he argued for a "New Republican Party" in which the GOP base among economic conservatives would be supplemented with new votes among social conservatives.

Three years later, his vision was vindicated as Republican bastions in high-income and northern Protestant neighborhoods were joined by the "Reagan Democrats"--middle-class, Catholic suburbanites, conservative white Southerners, and a larger share of the Jewish and Latino vote. This majority coalition lasted over a decade, and formed the base for the historic 1994 Congressional takeover.

Obama's attempt to create a new Democratic majority operates on a similar "build up, not tear down" strategy. Obama is finding ways to add moderate upper-income, educated whites of moderate-to-no religious persuasion to the Democratic base of racial minorities, labor union members, and progressive and secular whites. Conservatives and Republicans must think similarly if they hope to regain the majority.

Adding to the base does not mean that white evangelicals must continue to vote 74% Republican. Reagan's conservative strategy reduced the GOP strength among traditional Republicans, as some voted first for John Anderson and ultimately became Democrats. But the loss of share among traditional GOPers was more than made up by the newcomers.

There are many ways to rebuild that majority by adapting Reagan's 1977 playbook to the modern playing field. Conservatives can compete with Obama and the Democrats for votes among the mass educated affluent. Such an attempt could focus on social issues that unite people of various religious persuasions and economic issues that emphasize limiting government's growth while reforming the public sector to make it more responsive to individual needs.

They can also try to add working class Catholics and members of other faiths to the white evangelical base. A move in this direction could emphasize social issues that unite these disparate faiths and, crucially, use rhetoric that is cross-denominational. It would also require greater openness to the economic worries of the lower-middle and working classes, which include high payroll and property taxes and stagnant formal wages (rising health care costs are soaking up these workers' productivity gains).

Conservatives can also court the growing non-white portion of the electorate. This group is split between lower-skilled Latino workers and higher-skilled Asian immigrants, making the task complicated. But whatever the economic and social issues such outreach would employ, it will be difficult to make a serious play for these voters with an immigration platform that is perceived as restrictionist and exclusionary.

Each of these targets of opportunity presents challenges. But the challenge was no less for FDR as he built a coalition including blacks yearning for freedom and white segregationists, prohibitionist Baptists and wet Catholics looking for a good beer.

Recovery starts when denial stops. Republicans and conservatives who want to regain majority status must recognize that today's party base is different from the one Reagan built upon, and this fact shapes the contours of the coalitions they can build. The sooner they accept that fact, the sooner they can meet that challenge.