My own bumper sticker: " Bain would never hire Obama - too unqualified!"
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For those who have senior moments. Don't forget you have to click on it:
http://www.youtube.com/embed/Xv1tMioGgXI?rel=0
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Ten simple 'since when's' is it un-American or racially biased?
1)To aspire to achieve wealth.
2)To have to present identification for important reasons. Is voting as important as borrowing
a book from the library or boarding a plane?
3)To expect the Senate to pass a budget and spend tax dollars as if it was the
Senator's own earnings.
4)To have a foreign policy that supports our closest allies.
5)To encourage Americans to stand on their own feet and not begrudge those who do and can.
6)To believe that being an American is exceptional.
7)To treat all Americans as equals and not try to pit one against the other on some innocuous
basis called fairness.
8)To express oneself in public even if what is being expressed is against the policies and
actions and/or behaviour of the president.
9)To expect the Attorney General to tell the truth and the president to recognize he must act
within the constitutional powers of his office respecting the same of the legislative branch.
10) To expect the federal government will protect our borders from unlawful intrusion.
The answers are simple - when a bunch of misguided elected Obama president.
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Iran presses on while Obama,like Nero, fiddles!
The consequences Israel, and eventually the entire world, will face as a result.(See 1 and 1a
below.)
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Jeffrey Rosen believes he understands C.J. Roberts!
In protecting the public view of The Supreme Court has Roberts decided 5-4 is OK when he aloneis the causal Justice? You decide. (See 2 below.)
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Is the Fed driving the stock market? Analysis suggests so! (See 3 below.)
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Too good not to re-post! (See 4 below.)
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Off to Tybee - have great week.
Dick
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| Colonel (Res.) Ronen Cohen: Iranian response to Israeli attack could last years |
A long and bitter guerilla struggle may ensue, one that could last for a year or a number of years against Iranian combat units on Israel's northern border. An Israeli - Iranian War: The Iranian Perspective What are Tehran's goals in a confrontation with Israel? Why have the Iranians been prepared to fight for so many years? A special analysis by “The IDF is ready to move against Iran the minute it receives the green light,” declared IDF Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Benny Gantz in an interview broadcast on Israel's 64th Independence Day. “The Iranians are determined to build a nuclear weapon while they continue to dupe the international community,” Minister of Defense Ehud Barak added the following day. Israel's leaders face a series of existential questions: should Israel attack Iran or pursue the diplomatic track? When, if ever, is the right time to launch an attack? How should it be executed? How will Iran's leaders react to an attack on their nuclear facilities? The day after The most likely day-after scenario, as the international media sees it, is a devastating Iranian response based mainly, though not entirely, on its long-range missile arsenal. This attack would be coupled with terrorist strikes against Jewish and Israeli targets abroad, and backed by Hezbollah - Iran’s proxy in Lebanon. On the international front, Iran could wreak havoc on the global economy through fluctuations in oil prices, even though this could also ultimately harm Iran (it is unclear whether Iran or the West would suffer more in an oil war). Iran could respond with a four-way campaign with long-ranged counter-fire against Israel, terror activity on Israel's borders, attacks on Israelis and Jews overseas, and a limited conflict in the north of Israel. Israel is fully aware of the implications of the day after, but senior political-security figures have increasingly alleged that Iran's response capabilities are limited due to international constraints and its distance from Israel. From our perspective, Israel could withstand an Iranian retaliation, just as it has withstood missile attacks in the past. In his Independence Day speech, the chief of staff threw the proverbial ball into the political decision-makers' court, taking careful aim at the prime minister and minister of defense. The question is whether Israel is up to the challenge of a day-after scenario that is different from the one the media projects. If Israel initiates a military strike and Iran responds, Israel will face a security challenge of a magnitude that it has never experienced. It will be the first time in history that Israel faces a non-Arab state with an entirely different culture, mentality, and historical legacy. The same is true for the Iranians - for the first time they will be confronting Israel and the West. Furthermore, Israel has never carried out a military attack against a state on the brink of nuclear capability. An attack against Iran would be far different than the bombing of the nuclear reactor in Iraq or the air strike against the reactor in Syria (attributed to Israel). For Israel, the element of surprise is already gone, which in effect, has already enabled the enemy to carry out a series of steps. These steps range from instilling a state of awareness into their nation, political-strategic maneuvering, and preparations for both an offensive and defensive military response. Presenting a regional objective When we examine the rationale behind an Iranian response, we should assume that the regime in Tehran will make every effort to cause the "Zionist entity" such severe damage that it would restore the Islamic Republic to the lofty position of a regional superpower. Iran's choice of targets and its method of attack will be a regional and international display of Iranian strategy and military might. Iran cannot allow the campaign to end with it appearing ruined and humiliated. Another Iranian goal will be to safeguard its nuclear project so that it can quickly resume operations if damaged. An Iranian strike would probably be directed against Israel's population centers, since the Iranians believe that Israel would be hard-pressed to cope with a protracted campaign of attrition that weakens the home front. Upon examining these goals against the scenario established by the media, we can see that the scenario the media portrays would not attain Iran’s objectives. What then is the modus operandi that Iran will choose to meet its goals? A different kind of society To understand how the Iranian leadership operates, we must go back to the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War. Despite the extreme differences between that war and a possible Israeli-Iranian confrontation, it would be worthwhile to look at the way the Ayatollah regime, still in its infancy, waged its first war. At the time, following a break in relations with the US, the Iranian regime was isolated and bereft of superpower backing. Iraq received lavish military assistance from the Soviet Union, while Europe exerted pressure on Iran for disrupting the flow of oil caused by the war. During the long and bitter conflict, Iran's Republican Guards displayed a high degree of patience, endurance, and determination. The nation proved that it could weather massive attacks from unconventional weapons (poisonous gas) and retain its trust in its leadership. This is the heritage that Khomeini bequeathed to the Iranian people: fighting and winning against all odds. Those that believe Iran’s geographical distance from Israel will limit the Iranian response (the Iranians will mainly engage in long-range counter fire) fail to take into account the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah axis that enables Iran to bridge great distances. Republican Guard ground forces could be deployed along Israel's northern border and even engage the IDF in a protracted guerilla campaign. On the frontlines Israel must also take into account Hezbollah's role in such a scenario, since Israel could be tested in an unprecedented event. For the first time, Hezbollah would be completely subordinate to Tehran's leadership and the Iranian military command even though it is a Lebanese organization supported by the country's Shiite population. In an Israeli-Iranian war, Hezbollah would take orders from Iran in its first and perhaps only real opportunity to repay the enormous debt that it owes to Iran for building up its military strength. Another possibility is that Iran could launch a preemptive strike and place responsibility on Hezbollah, since Tehran has no interest in becoming entangled in hostilities prior to an Israeli attack. After an Israeli strike, the scope of Hezbollah's rocket fire into Israel's depth could parallel the developments in the fighting between Israel and Iran. Israel should not be surprised if this time the rocket and missile fire is entirely different from the past. Instead of gradual escalation at the outset, Hezbollah could unleash a massive missile barrage into the heart of Tel Aviv. Not today or in a few days Israel has to proceed with great caution in light of Iran’s policy and culture. A long and bitter guerilla struggle may ensue, one that could last for a year or a number of years against Iranian combat units on Israel's northern border. These scenarios are not the product of an imagination run wild, but logical directions that Iran could take as it aspires to realize its goal to become a regional superpower. *** 1a) Iran reports: War games showed missile accuracy
Local news websites say recent Revolutionary Guards drill also showcased capability of firing multiple missiles within seconds, which 'would create a challenge for US or Israel to intercept them'
War games this month showcased missiles with improved accuracy and firing capabilities, Iranian media reports said Friday, an apparent response to stepped up Western moves against Iran's nuclear program.
The UN Security Council has imposed several rounds of economic sanctions on Iran, aimed at persuading Iran to halt its uranium enrichment program. The sanctions have hit Iran's economy, but its leaders have refused to scale down the nuclear program.
 Shahab missiles fired during Iran army drill
Some of the missiles used during the war games used solid fuel, the reports said, improving the accuracy of the missiles.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2)Big Chief How to understand John Roberts.
By Jeffrey Rosen
IN THE WEEKS BEFORE the Supreme Court decided the fate of the Affordable Care Act, conservatives became increasingly worried that Chief Justice John Roberts was about to lose his nerve. The columnist George Will accused liberals of “put[ting] the squeeze” to Roberts, in the hope that he would “buckle beneath the pressure.” Fueling the hyperbole was a familiar fear: that Roberts would join the ranks of conservative apostates on the Court who have turned out to be less than ideologically pure.
Conservatives have long feared that Roberts might care too much about seeking common ground with liberal justices. While his political beliefs and judicial philosophy are conservative, Roberts employs a more conciliatory style than, say, Antonin Scalia. And unlike, for example, Clarence Thomas, who lives in a conservative social bubble, Roberts cares deeply about the Court’s image in the outside world.
And so, when Roberts indeed became the only conservative to join the four liberals in voting to uphold President Obama’s central legislative achievement, the right feared that its worst nightmare had come to pass. Howls of betrayal soon followed. National Review charged in an online editorial that Roberts had “done violence” to the Constitution. Marc Thiessen, writing in The Washington Post, attacked the chief justice for his “sophistry” and concluded that the right needs jurists with “the intestinal fortitude not to be swayed by pressure from The New York Times, the Georgetown cocktail circuit and the legal academy.”
Meanwhile, liberals found themselves in the unexpected position of applauding Roberts for his act of judicial statesmanship—unexpected because, in recent years, many on the left had cast Roberts as a radical bent on rewriting vast swaths of U.S. law. Now, the health care ruling had exposed for the first time a deep rift between Roberts and his conservative colleagues. Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy, and Samuel Alito had revealed their willingness to strike down much of the post–New Deal regulatory state; Roberts had wisely balked at the prospect. This startling break left observers of all political stripes wondering: Had John Roberts experienced a change of heart?
AT THE END OF ROBERTS’S first term as chief justice in July 2006, I interviewed him in his chambers at the Supreme Court. Our conversation, which I wrote about in an article for The Atlantic, was wide-ranging, but Roberts returned repeatedly to one theme: his desire to restore the bipartisan legitimacy of the Supreme Court.
In Roberts’s view, the Court was losing respect with the public because it issued too many rulings along partisan lines. “I do think the rule of law is threatened by a steady term-after-term focus on five–four decisions,” he said. “I think the Court is also ripe for a similar refocus on functioning as an institution,” he told me, “because if it doesn’t, it’s going to lose its credibility.”
Roberts said he had been inspired by the example of his greatest predecessor, John Marshall. “He could easily have got on the Court and said, ‘I’m the last hope of the Federalists: We’re out of Congress, we’re out of the White House, and I’m going to pursue that agenda here,’” he said. “But instead he said, ‘No, this is my home now, this is the Court, and we’re going to operate as a Court, and that’s important to me.’”
As we talked, it became clear that Roberts saw the promotion of consensus in service of the Court’s long-term interests as the greatest test of a successful chief justice. “I think judicial temperament is a willingness to step back from your own committed views of the correct jurisprudential approach and evaluate those views in terms of your role as a judge,” Roberts explained. “A justice is not like a law professor, who might say ‘This is my theory of this, and this is what I’m going to be faithful to and consistent with, and in twenty years we’ll look back and say, I had a consistent theory of the First Amendment as applied to a particular area,’” he said. “Coherence in the Court’s jurisprudence is more important than coherence in each individual justice’s jurisprudence.” He added, in a remark that now seems prescient, “I would like to think, looking back, that my opinions show a concern about the legitimacy of what we’re doing is an important part of the inquiry in each case.” The fact that Roberts was willing to defend the Court’s institutional legitimacy in the health care case confirms that he meant what he said.
His conservative colleagues, however, didn’t see it that way. In early July, three days after the health care decision was released, Jan Crawford of CBS News reported that Roberts had initially voted with the four conservatives to strike down the health care law but later switched sides. The conservatives were livid, according to Crawford, accusing Roberts of folding to liberal pressure and refusing to join even the parts of his opinions with which they agreed. In their dissent, Scalia and his colleagues made their anger plain. They sneered at the majority’s “feeble” arguments and ostentatiously referred to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s concurring opinion as a dissent, in order to draw attention to the vote switch. The fact that the story came to light was itself a sign of the conservatives’ deep sense of betrayal: Crawford attributed her report to “two sources with specific knowledge of the deliberations”—meaning either that the conservative justices or their clerks talked or that those with whom they discussed the case felt free to embarrass the chief justice on the conservatives’ behalf.
On the face of it, the conservatives’ extreme displeasure was hard to fathom, since Roberts’s so-called betrayal was only partial. While he voted to uphold the Affordable Care Act (ACA), he joined the conservatives in accepting the novel argument that health care reform was unconstitutional because Congress can only regulate economic activity, not economic inactivity—such as the failure to buy health insurance.
But perhaps the real reason for the conservatives’ anger was that Roberts had decided to protect the long-term institutional interests of the Court rather than embrace the conservative ideological agenda in its most radical dimensions. In their joint dissent, Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Kennedy outed themselves as partisans of the Constitution in Exile—the movement of economic libertarians who want the courts to resurrect pre–New Deal limits on federal power in order to dismantle the regulatory state piece by piece. The four conservatives railed about the need for the courts to protect states’ rights and individual liberty—even if doing so meant overriding the wishes of the people’s representatives. “Article I contains no whatever-it-takes-to-solve-a-national-problem power,” the dissenters huffed, in a phrase that sounded like the handiwork of Justice Scalia.
Roberts refused to join them. Instead, he emphasized Congress’s broad powers to solve national problems and the importance of judicial deference to Congress’s policy choices. And even in his endorsement of the “economic inactivity” argument, there were important differences between his approach and that of the four conservatives. Roberts and Ginsburg both noted that mandates to purchase goods are extremely rare and Congress has never relied on the Commerce clause to justify them. Therefore, the Court’s opinion is unlikely to constrain national policy in practice—in the event that Congress wants to mandate the purchase of any product in the future, it can now do so by invoking its taxing power. By contrast, the four conservatives embraced an even narrower interpretation of the Commerce clause and the taxing power. Justice Ginsburg’s powerful dissent on this point accused them of having embraced a “stunningly retrogressive” reading of the Commerce clause, threatening the return of an “era in which the Court routinely thwarted Congress’s efforts to regulate the national economy.”
Roberts also parted ways with his fellow conservatives over the question of Congress’s spending authority. In one of the more convoluted sections of the ruling, seven justices found that the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid was unconstitutionally coercive, because states that refused to participate would lose all their federal Medicaid funding, amounting to more than 10 percent of their entire budgets. However, Roberts and the liberals allowed the Medicaid expansion to stand by making a pragmatic fix—they simply prevented the government from threatening to withhold existing Medicaid funds. The four conservatives would have struck down the entire expansion, using logic that would call into question the constitutionality of many federal grants that impose conditions on the states, not to mention Medicaid itself.
For all the drama surrounding Roberts’s decision in the health care case, it was entirely consistent with his behavior since he joined the Court. His worldview is conservative, and he votes with the conservatives more often than not. But he has never joined them in embracing the most radical form of the Constitution in Exile. He generally favors narrow rulings over broad ones when possible, and prefers to chip away at precedents incrementally rather than to overturn them cleanly. (Justice Scalia scoffed at this incrementalism as “faux judicial restraint.”) He is willing to embrace “saving constructions” of laws in the spirit of John Marshall (Thomas Jefferson, Marshall’s archrival, derisively called them “twistifications”) in order to avoid striking down federal laws, as he did in the 2009 case upholding the Voting Rights Act. Yet, when Roberts believes that no such twistifications are possible, he enforces constitutional principles he cares about in sweeping terms, as he did in the Seattle affirmative action case that outlawed a program to integrate city schools.
All of these instincts converged in the health care case, in which Roberts set aside his ideological preference to protect the Court from a decision along party lines that would have imperiled its legitimacy. After initially siding with the conservatives, Roberts tried to persuade his liberal and conservative colleagues to converge around a result that would avoid a sweeping 5–4 ruling along party lines, according to Crawford. When that proved impossible, he chose the least disruptive path, upholding the mandate by finding that it was within Congress’s taxing power. The decision revealed the chief justice as a master strategist with a nuanced concern for institutional integrity that is less dramatic or nefarious than the characterizations advanced by partisans on the left or the right. But grasping these nuances is crucial to understanding how Roberts is shaping the Court.
Whether Roberts forgets the sniping of his colleagues is another matter. But with his deft performance in the health care case, Roberts made the Court his own in a way of which Marshall would have approved. Like Marshall, Roberts means to act strategically, over decades, always looking ahead and biding his time.
Jeffrey Rosen is the Legal Affairs Editor of The New Republic. This article appeared in the August 2, 2012 issue of the magazine.
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3)Who's Really Driving the Stock Market?
Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan remembers the stock market boom under his tenure fondly. He wrote in his 2007 memoir: "People would stop me on the street and thank me for their 401(k); I'd be cordial in response, though I admit I occasionally felt tempted to say, 'Madam, I had nothing to do with your 401(k).' It's a very uncomfortable feeling to be complimented for something you didn't do."
For a man never short on ego, he may have been underestimating himself.
In one of the most startling studies I've ever seen, researchers from the Federal Reserve this week measured how much the stock market is influenced by...the Federal Reserve. Their conclusion: "Since 1994, [stock] returns are essentially flat if the three-day windows around scheduled FOMC announcement days are excluded."
The Federal Reserve announces what it's going to do to interest rates eight times a year at Federal Open Market Committee meetings. These are scheduled in advanced and well-publicized, so investors know exactly when the goods are coming.
Since 1994 (when the Fed started publicizing its moves), the S&P 500 has risen from 450 to 1300. But remove the 24 hours just prior to FOMC announcements, and returns fall to almost nothing:
Source: Federal Reserve.
The researchers note: "More than 80 percent of the equity premium on U.S. stocks has been earned over the twenty-four hours preceding scheduled Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcements."
Might some of this be a coincidence? Highly doubtful. My colleague Matt Koppenheffer took market data going back to 1994 and randomly removed 136 days (eight per year for 17 years, or one for every FOMC meeting). The difference, compared with the unmolested market returns, was trivial. We ran the simulation several hundred times, removing different sets of random days. Nothing came within a third of the skew caused by removing the days shortly before FOMC meetings.
This doesn't mean Fed policies have been responsible for the majority of the market's rise since 1994. After-tax corporate profits have increased fourfold since 1994, or more than double after inflation. Cellphones in 1994 were brick-like boxes, less reliable than carrier pigeons. Today you can stream live video on an iPhone. That's real innovation and progress that accrues value to shareholders. The Fed has played an enormous role in boom-and-bust cycles and has inflated asset prices for decades, but it's hardly the only driver of long-term market returns.
And when the researchers looked at the returns of bonds and currency exchange rates -- whose values should be more sensitive to Fed policy -- in the day before FOMC announcements, they didn't "find any differential returns ... on FOMC days compared with other days." That's not to say Fed policy didn't inflate the values of those assets -- indeed, almost by definition, it did -- but the effects weren't concentrated into a single day like they were in the stock market.
Why is that? I think it's a good example of how short-term and headline-driven stock markets behave. The stock market has been dubbed "the bond market's idiot kid brother," which seems appropriate here. Back in the '90s, CNBC hyped what it called the "briefcase indicator," using a live video feed of Alan Greenspan's morning walk from the Fed's parking lot to his office to gauge the thickness of his briefcase. If it was thick, it meant he was studying hard and preparing to make big changes. If it was thin, his mind was clear, and interest rates were likely to be left alone. This went on for years before people realized how ridiculous the theory was.
But the amount of short-term, carnival-barker thinking that permeates markets has, I think, gotten progressively worse over the years. Bond markets tend to process information in measured, calculated ways. The stock market, unable to think past next Tuesday, takes the binge-and-forget approach. Over the long haul, stocks are driven by business fundamentals, but any given day's movements are almost entirely headline-driven.
Just after I read the Fed's report, a news article crossed my screen. "Nearly two-thirds of the 30 investment experts surveyed by CNNMoney agree that the Fed's latest move to extend its so-called Operation Twist policy was warranted," it read.
Can you blame them?
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4)As Obama Falters and Romney Consults, 2012 Election Exposes an Office Looking for The Man
By CONRAD BLACK
As we plod into the final two months before the presidential election campaign officially begins (although they in fact begin about two years before the election that precedes the one for which the campaign is intended), there is still time to review what the purpose and principal issues are, before the fog of myth-making, sound-back-biting, wedge issues from imaginary wars on women to the ethics of private equity, and more traditional polemical and fabulist nostrums reduce the electorate to prostrations of boredom and insensibility. This is, in straight sociological terms, an interesting, and even perhaps unprecedented election, as it is not clear what either party or candidate is advocating, apart from the avoidance of the purgatorial misery his opponent would inflict on the nation.
President Obama cannot run on his record and makes no effort to do so. The economic recovery that was coming and coming and coming, is allegedly still coming, but isn’t here. That is the same recovery that he could not produce overnight, and now cannot produce because of the shambles in Europe, which falls on America because Europe is “our greatest trading partner.” This is more diaphanous rubbish than most such apologia: Foreign trade takes less than 15 percent of American production; Europe, even when taken as a whole, is only the fifth trading partner (after Canada, China, Mexico, and Japan); Europe generally is not in worse condition than the U.S. (Germany especially is functioning much better); and concerns about the 17-nation euro have largely driven the investment of $900 billion by Europeans in the United States since 2008, almost twice the previous traditional rate.
Unemployment and under-employment have effectively doubled from the average of the Clinton-George W. Bush years, while national debt has increased a stupefying 50% in this term, most of it bogus debt issued to the Federal Reserve and paid for in Monopoly Money notes. There is a broad national consensus for the repeal of Obamacare, whose constitutionality has been upheld, provided it is recognized as a tax. Not content with that, the administration’s media spear-carriers have denied that it is a tax, though it does appear to be an obligatory payment of about $525 billion, one of the largest fiscal impositions in history. Apart from the killing of bin Laden, it escapes my ability to find one success in any field that can be credited to this singularly self-satisfied administration.
But facing it is an opponent who seems incapable of credibly embracing anything more precise than the most soporific generalities. W. M. Romney is a consultant who assembles data and experts and who has no apparent notion of the nature, history, destiny, or national purpose of America. That charge cannot be leveled at the incumbent. Barack Obama does feel that the United States has missed the humanitarian bus and is overinvested in capitalism, meritocracy, and private enterprise, and as a result has been excessively plagued by racism, war, and economic inequalities. He has a completely unoriginal tax-and-spend notion of how to deal with that, though he has packaged it fairly innocuously as reform, fairness, ecological protection, and the spirit of charity; and has enacted it through regulation and executive order, having little ability to gain congressional adoption of any of his program.
This is America’s conundrum: a president who believes in rather silly things, even if his instincts are benign (and that is not what Julia Roberts called, in Pretty Woman, “a sure thing”), against a challenger whose beliefs are likely to be reasonably acceptable, although they emerge only after extensive consultation with pollsters and are, at the best of times, likely to change without notice on the basis of the ebb and flow of opinion.
Mr. Obama has the benefit of being a conviction politician, though most of the convictions are bad and the execution is sloppy — or malevolent and cynical, as in his inchoate war against the Roman Catholic leadership, assumedly based on the theory that the Catholic bishops were just a bunch of irrelevant ninnies. As William Daley and Joe Biden and other administration Catholics who know something about their faith warned him, Mr. Obama struck the shoals of Roman Catholic belief. Mr. Obama had no idea what he was getting into, and moved on to injudicious comments about the Trayvon Martin race-relations trial in Florida.
Mr. Romney is apparently a conviction-free zone, apart from marriage, faith (a version of Christianity that has gotten a pass on polygamy but hasn’t run yet the full media gauntlet on the discovery of sacred texts near Rochester, N.Y., any more than Romney has heard the last of taking his dog to Canada on the roof of his car), and a recognizable notion of the enterprise economy, which does distinguish him from his opponent. The positive side of his policy vacuity is that there is no more reason to believe that Mr. Romney is a fanatical homophobe, or a believer in balancing the budget by simply cutting expenses by blindfolded dart-throwing at a wall on which government programs are enumerated, or sending women who have abortions to prison, than there is to think that he really believes what he currently professes to regard as his bedrock of political convictions.
In his policy goals, he is a clock that not only faces in all four directions, but revolves as it does so. That is preferable to being fixed on bad policy options, and Mr. Romney’s record as an executive, contrary to the scandalous imputations of his long under-employed opponents, indicates a competence to find and execute a sensible course. Even if, which is not the case, he were, as has been alleged, just an asset-stripper who promoted unemployment, at least he demonstrated some considerable competence at running a company.
If Mr. Romney wins, the country will get better government than it has had for some years; if Mr. Obama wins, the condition of the country will become so dire that it will certainly do better next time. The burning questions are, Why has the United States had such poor government since its great victory in the Cold War, after 60 years of administration that has generally ranged from competent to inspired (Carter having been the only one of the ten presidents from FDR to Bush Senior who was probably not up to it); and, How confident can anyone be that the Constitution really is working?
Whatever the legalities in the Obamacare case, the speculation that the chief justice flipped to avoid a political crisis has helped reveal the under-worked, over-lionized Supreme Court for the opinionated, capricious gang of sinecure-holders that it is. Its popularity, while still far ahead of that of the other branches, has finally descended to about 40%, a trend that, barring the greatest resuscitation since Lazarus, will continue. It persisted in its levitation for so long only because the public doesn’t much focus on it, and the court doesn’t generally tax, spend, or go to war. But it has sat, as mute and inert as a suet pudding, while the prosecutocracy has gutted the Bill of Rights; turned the plea bargain into an infamy of inquisition, extortion, and perjury; made a mockery of due process and the rights of man; and upheld the absolute immunity even of prosecutors who willfully lie and suppress exculpatory evidence (in the unspeakable Supreme Court decision in Connick v. Thompson). Much of the American problem is in the trifecta of having 5% of the world’s population, 25% of its prisoners, and 50% of its lawyers.
The high court is a disenthralled Nero, the Congress is an anthill of lobbyists and special interests, and it is probably 20 years since the country has had a president with the character, intelligence, and judgment that great office requires. But in a democracy, the people get the government they deserve, and the fault is in ourselves. The judges haven’t judged; the legislators haven’t legislated, the presidents haven’t presided, but nor have the teachers taught, the information industry informed, or the beneficiaries and inheritors of responsible government acted responsibly. The United States still has an incomparably talented and motivated workforce and a patriotic population in a naturally rich and stable country. The Constitution is as magnificent as ever. But the electorate cleaned house in 1992, 1994, 2000, 2006, and 2008, and the condition of the country has gotten worse and not better.
The United States has been one of the most innovative political societies in history; if it can’t find a Lincoln or Roosevelt (of either party) to lead, perhaps it should govern itself by referendary, participatory democracy (which does not mean poll-taking). Put every important question to the voters, like the Swiss do. The political class has failed, at least for the time being. Mr. Romney is a consultant who loves to consult experts and examine data. The office may be seeking the man after all.
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