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ith less than three weeks to go in the Bush presidency, AP has finally let ‘er rip, running a blushingly positive portrait of our president, Bush’s Personality Shapes His Legacy by AP White House correspondent Ben Feller.

Feller presents a portrait of a very intelligent president who probes for answers, loves efficiency, reads voraciously (US and world history), and understands and appreciates honor.  Bush’s malapropisms are curtly dismissed with just a paragraph so more time can be given to more significant parts of his character – athleticism, commitment, love of his family, casual likability.

This is the Bush all of us who respect the president have known all along.  If Feller and his compatriots had been writing from this foundation since 2000, the rest of the world would know it as well. So Feller and his press corps bedfellows are not very good fellows at all, are they?

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While Obama-mania runs rampant in Hawaii – without any calls for him to get back to reality and deal with Gaza – we come across this from Think Progress:

While Bush has been briefed on the situation by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, he has opted not to interrupt his final vacation as president to make a public statement on the crisis.

And this from ABC News

:

Even an emerging crisis in the Middle East, one he pledged to resolve just 13 months ago, has not drawn President George W. Bush from his final vacation before leaving office.  Despite his personal pledge at Annapolis last year to broker a deal between Israel and the Palestinians before 2009, this weekend Bush sent his spokesmen to comment in his stead.

Despite his personal pledge?  What of Bill Clinton’s pledge? Or Carter’s? Or Reagan’s? Or Daddy Bush’s pledge?

Of course, if Bush were to make a statement from Crawford or head back to DC, these same folks would make little of it, ridiculing him as a lame duck or worse.  And even more certainly, anything Bush says, short of announcing troop deployment, neither Israel or Hamas would pay much attention.

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oday, president George W. Bush’s Commerce Dept. sided with environmental and no-growth loons and killed a much needed new toll road in OC.  Commerce was the final appeal after the draconian California Coastal Commission voted down the project.

There was a day when the Commerce Dept. stood for … get this! … commerce.  It supported the concept of the movement of goods and people, and gave the nation’s economic growth a higher standing than dubious arguments about perceived environmental harm or impacts on state parks.

Take state parks for a moment.  Opponents say  San Onofre Beach State Park is one of the most used in the state and the planned toll road’s impact on it will be devastating. The argument is so bogus only a fool (i.e., someone in the Bush admin) would believe it.

The park is L-shaped, with two distinct areas – one a lightly used, non-descript campground upstream, and one a heavily used campground along the coast, above Trestles Beach, one of the better surf spots along the coast.  The toll road will pretty much ruin any outdoors experience at the upstream campground, but that’s hardly an impact since it gets so little use.

The campground above the beach is immediately adjacent to Interstate 5, where cars and trucks roar by all day and night, and California’s major north-south rail line, where trains do the same, and finally, it’s next to the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, which is hardly a call back to nature.  This highly impacted setting is the popular part of the park, and people flock to it despite the cars, trucks, trains, exhaust fumes,  and near-by ongoing nuclear reaction.  The toll road would add almost nothing negative to this; in fact, it would reduce traffic jams in the area and probably marginally improve the overall experience.

Yet Bush’s Commerce Dept. fell for that, just as they fell for the argument that there’s a viable alternative route; there’s really not, and now we’re damned to increasing congestion and worsening runoff pollution from the I-5.  Worse, Bush has emboldened the greenie/no-growth movement and they’re probably even now in search of a new target for their efforts.

Ironically, all this happens as Obama calls for massive infrastructure improvements to spur the economy.  The toll road was such a project and it would have employed thousands for several years.  it is a harbinger of the environmental/no-growth opposition Obama will face when he tries to roll out his infrastructure-heavy stimulus.

Conservative ideals (remember those) are not anti-environment because stewardship is part of conservatism.  But our ideals should allow us to easily differentiate between a reasonable level of regulation and environmental protection on the one hand and environmental extremism on the other.  Commerce’s decision today is more evidence of how far from conservative ideals Bush has moved, and it’s a clarion call for the need for the GOP to not move away from those ideals.

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Welcome To The World Of Idiots

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here’s a fire! Quick, grab the fire extinguisher! … No, wait … we’re too stupid to use a fire extinguisher!

At least that’s how the world’s ultimate nanny state, the once-proud global empire of the United Kingdom:

Fire extinguishers could be removed from communal areas in flats throughout the country because they are a safety hazard, it has emerged.

The life-saving devices encourage untrained people to fight a fire rather than leave the building, risk assessors in Bournemouth decided.

Dorset Fire and Rescue defended the move, saying: ‘Obviously, in some cases, an extinguisher could come in useful but, with new building regulations, every escape route should be completely fireproof.’

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents backed their removal because different extinguishers should be used on different types of fire. (Source, via What Bubba Knows)

Yeah, that’s definitely too much for mere citizens like us to understand. Better we burn up than try to fend for ourselves without the help of our state-employed saviors, who are are smart enough to save us.  Bring on the Nannies. Continue Reading »

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he media bias never ceases … and never ceases to amaze me. Today, President-elect Obama came to the White House at the invitation of President Bush, and how does the Washington Post headline it on its home page?

Bush Meets with Obama at the White House

I kind of thought it was the other way around. Usually when you accept someone’s invitation and go to their place, you’re meeting with them. WaPo and the rest of the Mainly Marginalized Media just don’t know when to stop. Heck, I don’t think they even know how to stop.

The actual story, BTW, has a more moderate headline: Obamas Make Symbolic Visit to Future Home: White House.

How fitting for a guy whose entire political career has ridden on symbolism.

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hile the more sober Dem commentators are trying to explain away Obama’s fascination with redistribution of wealth, the more blood-thirsty are busy dancing on the grave of the conservative movement. They’re forgetting that the body’s not in the ground yet.

Case in point:

The modern conservative movement is dying in front of our eyes, and its death throes aren’t pretty. As John McCain heads for likely defeat, the GOP is eating itself. Right-wing politicians and pundits who never criticized Bush in eight years are suddenly jumping ship like rats, while bitter-end loyalists angrily accuse them of being “pathetically opportunistic.” After months of veering from one tactic to the next, McCain has finally settled on one message for his campaign, but it’s absurd: claiming that the party whose signature is tax cuts for the rich is really on the side of Joe the Plumber.

Meanwhile, 3.1 million real Joe the Plumbers across America are sending Barack Obama hundreds of millions of dollars, a torrent of cash that is helping to flush the GOP down the national toilet.

That’s the always quotable (not a compliment) Gary Kamiya, writing today in Salon. (You may remember Kamiya; I wrote rather extensively in September about his appalling ignorant and sexist piece, The Dominatrix, subtitled, “Sarah Palin is trying to seduce independent voters.” In his self-penned Salon bio, he admits he:

…lives on a street with cable cars with his wife, Kate Moses, and her son Zachary. He likes big cities, ’50s paperbacks with gratuitous cleavage on their covers, Steve Young, backpacking, Italy and people who like to talk. …

After moving to California, he attended Berkeley High, where the student government was run by a dadaist cabal; put in a brief, LSD-riddled stint at Yale; and some aimless years later washed up in the UC-Berkeley English Department …

In other words, he’s one of those San Francisco loons who hasn’t invested a brain cell in trying to understand conservative thought because he’s so busy making snide jokes and outrageous statements about it, thinking all the time he’s mainstream. Oh, how I hope and pray McCain pulls it out – stopping Obamadness is fine, but grinding Kamiya’s face in his smug self-assuredness is even better!

Whatever the outcome of the election, it won’t be the death of the American conservative movement.  Kamiya seems to miss the point that McCain is not the captain of the movement. Most of us voted for someone else in the primaries and accepted McCain with some reluctance when the old fighter got the nomination as conservatives split their votes between several candidates. But since then, Obama’s hard left, redistributive politics would make Lincoln Chafee look like a conservative Republican, so McCain’s OK with us.

You just can’t blame him for what’s going on with conservatism. That happened last spring and summer, as we watched a moderate take the ticket; the campaign since hasn’t been about conservatism, despite the partial return to the fold Palin brought with her.

Back to Joe the Plumber. Kamiya can rattle his PC-approved, SF-issued blunt, wobbly saber, but he does so while ignoring the changes in the poll numbers since redistribution of wealth entered the campaign with Joe. In spouting the 3.1 million donors, he ignores that Obama is running a crooked campaign, refusing to set up contribution software that matches the donor’s address with that on the credit card, so he can steal contributions.  How many of your 3.1 million are from people who are committing fraud with Obama’s approval, Kamiya? How many are donations from King Kong, Bart Simpson or Daffy Duck?

You have to wonder what world Kamiya’s been on for the last eight years:

There’s something surreal about how fast the GOP has gone from arrogant triumphalism to its death throes. Just yesterday, the GOP’s mighty Titanic was cruising along, its opulent decks lined with fat-cat financiers and neoconservative warmongers, all smoking cigars, drinking champagne and extolling the deathless virtues of their fearless captain. The compliant media issued glowing dispatches. Karl Rove cackled with glee as he plotted out a permanent Republican majority.

Rote, rote, rote; it’s the chant of the closed-eyed Left, even down to the thought that the media, the left-leaning, Obama-backing media, are compliant to the Bushies.

Kamiya goes on with more of this sort of analysis that, while it plays well with the majority of Salon readers, wholly misses the point.  And the point is as big as an elephant.  It is not conservativism that will die should Obama be elected, it is liberalism.  The capture of the Democrat Party by the hard-left, socialist, redistributive, anti-war, anti-American minority will have been realized and classic American liberalism, already on life support, will be euthanized.

As for conservatism, should Obama win, it will grow like Topsy, becoming healthier than ever.  Americans reject redistribution, as Gallup found way back in June:

When given a choice about how government should address the numerous economic difficulties facing today’s consumer, Americans overwhelmingly—by 84% to 13%—prefer that the government focus on improving overall economic conditions and the jobs situation in the United States as opposed to taking steps to distribute wealth more evenly among Americans.

Conservatism is the only wrench the 84 percent will have available to them to throw into the cogs of Obama’s socialist machine.  Thank goodness it’s a strong wrench.

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Updated

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t appears that under the plan Pres. Bush announced this a.m., the federal government (i.e., you and me) will spend up to $700 billion to buy back troubled mortgages from banks. AP characterizes these mortgages as “toxic,” and that’s a good definition.

I do not want one penny of my currently very dear money to go toward saving people who lied about their income on “‘no stated income” loans. And not a penny to people who made bad bets on the market with nothing down mortgages. And the people who sold and repackaged these mortgages? Let them stew in their own desperate financial juices.

Not one penny to any of them, and I don’t care what the consequences are!

Here’s what we should do instead: Be a government of the people, not a government of the businesses and the lobbyists. We should set up a short-term (three years ’til it sunsets) federal mortgage repackaging house. It would have only one purpose: To rewrite an individual taxpayer’s loan as a 50-year fixed (or even a 100-year fixed; such mortgages are common in Japan).

People who are in bad mortgages or are otherwise about to lose their houses would have show an ability to pay, with the term of the mortgage being flexible enough to allow some pretty underqualified people to slide through. Interest rates, though, would be competitive, not written down at our expense, so the government would be able to sell the mortgages to the private sector at auctions.

Those who are not able to meet the income requirements for a 50- or 100-year fixed would lose their houses. They don’t deserve to keep them; welcome to the wonderful world of personal responsibility. Even so, this would reduce dramatically the number of foreclosures on the market, which would help the homebuilding industry come back.

Also helping the homebuilders is the probability that new longer-term mortgages would become widely available through the private sector, to be used for new home purchases in addition to bail-outs. This is pivotal to a recovery because you just cannot underscore the importance of home-buying to the economy. In the early 2000s, the homebuilding industry had the highest sales of all industries in California – outpacing even retail for a year or two. That translates as jobs, purchases, taxes – what makes the world go round. If the “‘fix” doesn’t fix the homebuilding, it’s not a fix.

And what of the institutions, with their MBAs and PhDs that dreamed up mortgage based derivatives and other instruments of economic death? Let them all crash where they may, and watch very carefully the new institutions that will quickly rise to fill the void. Congressional hearings will be needed from day one to track what they’re doing and hold them responsible, and the members of Congress who serve on the oversight committees will just have to deal with the fact that America will no longer tolerate the acceptance of campaign funding from the industry they oversee, you SOB Chris Dodd.

Finally, we need to treat new financial products like we treat new pharmaceuticals. They need to be overseen, tested and certified by a Federal Financial Instruments Agency before they are foisted on the market, because like Thalidomide, they can create great human suffering if there’s something wrong with them.

This could work, and work without selling a lousy mortgage on America to our grandchildren and great-grandchildren, unlike the plan Bush outlined today. That plan just might prove the crazy liberals right: It just might make him the worst president in American history.

Update: Paul Krugman agrees:

I hate to say this, but looking at the plan as leaked, I have to say no deal. Not unless Treasury explains, very clearly, why this is supposed to work, other than through having taxpayers pay premium prices for lousy assets.

As I posted earlier today, it seems all too likely that a “fair price” for mortgage-related assets will still leave much of the financial sector in trouble. And there’s nothing at all in the draft that says what happens next; although I do notice that there’s nothing in the plan requiring Treasury to pay a fair market price. So is the plan to pay premium prices to the most troubled institutions? Or is the hope that restoring liquidity will magically make the problem go away?

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t is, in the end, all Bush’s fault.

Isn’t it always? 9/11, Iraq, gas prices, and now the Russian invasion of Georgia, to the Bush-hating left, there is a common cause for all this, and its middle initial is W. Here’s the position, as espoused by Fred Kaplan in Slate:

Regardless of what happens next, it is worth asking what the Bush people were thinking when they egged on Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s young, Western-educated president, to apply for NATO membership, send 2,000 of his troops to Iraq as a full-fledged U.S. ally, and receive tactical training and weapons from our military. Did they really think Putin would sit by and see another border state (and former province of the Russian empire) slip away to the West? If they thought that Putin might not, what did they plan to do about it, and how firmly did they warn Saakashvili not to get too brash or provoke an outburst?

As always, there’s no effort to look at the other side. What would have happened if we hadn’t been friendly to Georgia? If we hadn’t offered military training and accepted their involvement in Iraq? If we hadn’t pushed to expand NATO to the former Russian republics slave states? My hunch: Putin’s KGB-based Russia would have attacked Georgia one way or the other.

But to the Left, the position is to see a crisis, dredge up a one-dimensional recitation of Bush policies and blame all the evil on Bush. And from that base assumption, everything the Bush administration does must be just as evil. More Kaplan:

Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly called Saakashvili on Sunday to assure him that “Russian aggression must not go unanswered.” We should all be interested to know what answer he is preparing or whether he was just dangling the Georgians on another few inches of string. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, told the Security Council, “This is completely unacceptable and crosses a line.” Talk like that demands action. What’s the plan, and how does he hope to get the Security Council—on which Russia has veto power—to approve it?

Again, what is the alternative? Would Kaplan prefer Cheney call Saakashvili and tell him, “Tough luck. We’re OK with Putin sending tanks into free democracies?” Is Khalilzad supposed to tell the UN no line was crossed when Russian troops poured over the borderline? That lifts appeasement to the level of acceptance and support and no American president, not even Jimmy Carter, has ever taken such a position.

Of course Russia must answer for its aggression because of course they crossed the line. Kaplan is right that there is no military solution; heck, the military options (short of nuclear holocaust) were gone as soon as Russian air strikes started because getting a military force into Georgia is a logistical nightmare – but not as bad as the idea of fighting Russian troops on the edge of the Russian nation.

Like many of us, when it comes to Georgia, I’ve gone a vaguely supportive, lightly educated follower of Saakashvili’s democratic revolution to a fairly well read interested party, but I’m hardly a policy wonk on the issues. With that introduction, here’s what I think:

We’re on the right side. Standing up for democracies is something we just have to do, even if they’re poorly functioning. We never supported Georgia to goad Russia; we did it to encourage more democracy in the region, including in Russia.

We should continue to push for NATO expansion. Kaplan says that if Georgia were in NATO, we’d be in a shooting war with Russia now, but that’s ridiculous. If Georgia were in NATO it’s much more likely Russian troops would not be in Georgia now. So, with the knowledge that we no longer need to or should support Europe with the sort of military actions that were anticipated when NATO was formed following WWII, we should continue expansive military alliances there, just as we promote economic alliances.

We should make Russia pay, literally, for rebuilding. They’ve got the money and if we force the issue at the U.N., they’re likely to be in the unfortunate position of having to veto the action, which would be a PR disaster for them.

We should work with nations dependent on energy from the trans-Georgia pipelines to secure broad legal protections for Georgia’s control over them, not Russia’s.

We should look to the other former Soviet vassal states and see what sort of support we can give them. Some are feeling very vulnerable today, and the creation of a united front of indignant outrage that includes these states and many, many others will send a message even to Russia.

We should not spill any blood over Georgia. Our support should be broad and deep but there’s no point in sending troops into anywhere we can’t sustain them.

Russia should be dis-invited from the G8 until they learn how to behave like a civilized nation.

We should pass quite a lot of anti-Russian legislation at the federal and state level. Public portfolios should be cleansed of any Russian filth. The Air Force tanker contract should to to Boeing because it’s the only bidder that doesn’t have partial Russian ownership. No banking or trade favors allowed.

And we should pass a law that no American president can ever again look a Russian president in the eye, see his soul and deem him trustworthy. That was, in fact, a very big mistake by George W. Bush

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ver since the great drilling debate was launched, I’ve wondered why President Bush linked lifting the federal executive orders banning offshore drilling to Congress lifting its own drilling bans. It was a ridiculous position strategically, and it’s good that Bush is not so stubborn that he refused to change his tactics.

Now that he’s scratched the executive orders, all eyes are on Congress, where Bush should have directed them in the first place. (Is this really that hard to figure out?!)

From this a.m.’s WSJ, we see the Obama response to Bush’s call for expanded drilling:

Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said that if lifting the moratorium on offshore exploration “would provide short-term relief at the pump or a long-term strategy for energy independence, it would be worthy of our consideration, regardless of the risks. But most experts, even within the Bush administration, concede it would do neither.” The White House said Mr. Bush’s proposals would take years to have their full impact.

So? Let’s ask the obvious unasked question: How do oil’s years-to-market compare to the number of years it’ll take to get the ramshackle gaggle of alternative energies to make as big a contribution? No one’s guessing; but anyone with any critical capacity at all can and should question the Dem supposition that it’ll take capitalists sniffing money 10 years to stuff their pockets with bucks from new oil sales.

How about one year instead? Sound more realistic? From the same article:

A Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst said in a report there is a lot of offshore crude that can be produced relatively quickly. The problem: It is located off California, where politicians have built careers opposing new drilling.

The Minerals Management Service said that of the estimated 18 billion barrels of oil in off-limits coastal areas, almost 10 billion are off the coast of California.

“California could actually start producing new oil within a year if the moratorium were lifted,” the Sanford C. Bernstein report said, because the oil is under shallow water, has been explored and drilling platforms have been there since before the moratoria. (emphasis added)

One year! That would generate instantaneous downward price pressure on the oil futures market and would quickly impact the price at the pump.

So what did Obama’s Chicago hack politics buddy and DNC dirty work king Rahm Emanuel have to say about all this?

“I’ve been in Washington long enough to know a political stunt when I see one.”

And I know a political party trying desperately to appease its environmentalist, anti-corporate, elitist special interests when I see one.

Photo: Ian Parker

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ancy Pelosi must be staying up late, struggling to think of ways to make Congress even less popular than its current favorability rating of nine percent. And by gumbo, she’s hit on it!

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said this morning that the House Judiciary Committee may hold hearings on an impeachment resolution offered by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio). …

Pelosi has said previously that impeachment “was off the table,” so her comments this morning were surprising, and clearly signaled a new willingness to entertain the idea of ousting Bush …. (Politico)

Meanwhile, Bush’s popularity is shining brightly at a comparatively wonderful 32 percent.

NanPo, my dear, may I suggest that if this moves forward you name the resolution, “Resolution of the House of Representatives Calling for the Pot to Call the Kettle Black.”

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