The next time you hear anyone brag that the Fed must have saved the economy (again), because the stock market is up 17 or whatever percent since Bernanke conjured up $600,000,000,000 out of thin air, just haul out this depressing and revealing little statistic.
Because in real terms, the stock market is up exactly bupkis.
And up the bupkis is exactly where you’re taking Bernanke’s Keynesian wet dreams.
Change in the 112th Congress:
The Constitution frequently gets lip service in Congress, but House Republicans next year will make sure it gets a lot more than that – the new rules the incoming majority party proposed this week call for a full reading of the country’s founding document on the floor of the House on Jan. 6.
To China, North Korea is a worrisome nuisance — but also a convenient thorn in our side. While the Norks keep us busy up here, China can poke around down there, around Taiwan. But the balance might be changing, at least if this WSJ report is accurate:
hina has made a public show over the past two weeks of urging all sides to show restraint, but to Washington’s chagrin has refused to blame North Korea for the sinking of a South Korean ship in March or the Nov. 23 artillery attack that killed four people on a South Korean island in the Yellow Sea.
In a departure from the sharp tone Washington has taken lately toward China, U.S. officials credited Beijing with playing a central role in helping convince the North not to retaliate—as it had earlier suggested it would—to an artillery exercise South Korea held near the island Monday.
A senior Obama administration official portrayed China as increasingly frustrated with the North’s actions, which also included its disclosure in November of a new uranium-enrichment facility, and said China’s “view has been changed about the need to act” by the “sheer outrageousness” of the North’s moves.
As I’ve argued for a while now, the best end to North Korea’s succession crisis might be PLA paratroopers descending on Pyongyang to deliver the coup de grace to this unstable and evil regime.
PJTV rounds out the year with a series of shorts called 10 in 2. That’s 2010 in two-minutes segments. Altogether, we must’ve made 15 or 20 or more of the things. My first contribution is up, and it’s “The Biggest Loser.”
The Washington Post headline reads, “No looking back for Pelosi,” and I can’t say I’m too surprised — she never struck me as a very reflective creature.
But then again, most vampires aren’t.
A special holiday message to the 111th Congress, from Ferris Bueller.
Thirty years ago, Apple wanted to be just like Sony. That hasn’t been true in a long time, and Sony is still trying to play catch up. Here’s the latest attempt:
Sony on Wednesday launched a new streaming music subscription service which it hopes will take on Apple’s iTunes by offering a different approach to digital music sales.
“Music Unlimited powered by Qriocity” is a cloud-based digital music service. Unlike iTunes, users do not purchase and download tracks. Instead, they stream them.
The service is not available on portable devices, meaning users can’t take their music on the go. The service debuted Wednesday in Ireland and the U.K., and will launch in the U.S., Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and New Zealand in 2011.
Kazuo Hirai, executive vice president of Sony, said the initial focus of the product is to enhance the appeal of Sony products versus competitors like Apple and Microsoft, according to The Associated Press. But he said “over time” the service would need to “stand on its own.”
So Music Unlimited is just like every other failed subscription service, only you can’t stick it in your portable.
This has “win” written all over it.
Cynthia Tucker: GOP resistance to New Start is “unpatriotic.”
Hair of the Dog: It’s a gimme this week, as Joe Biden spends a half hour talking to David Gregory. But there’s still great stuff from my secret bromance with Juan Williams and George Will gets down with the Tea Party.
Coast to Coast Tea Party: The national movement is going… hyper-local?
This week’s PJM Political is hot off the Sirius/XM satellite and ready for your internet streaming pleasure.
WaPo’s Dan Balz on President Obama’s “resilience” after last month’s shellacking:
What seems clear is that Obama has begun to position himself back on more comfortable ground in the wake of the self-described shellacking Democrats took in the midterm elections. By instinct and demeanor, he is a politician who prefers finding common ground with his opponents. At a moment of political weakness, the tax package provided him the vehicle to quickly reassert that part of his political personality at a time when he needed the public to take a fresh look at him. [Emphasis way added.]
They’ve said this about Obama for years, that he’s some sort of Great Compromiser, who would bridge the gaps between Left and Right, between Black and White, and all the other chasms of American political and social life — like… I dunno, like some miraculous kind of spackling paste.
The same Obama whose (admittedly thin) Senate voting record was to the left of Vermont Socialist Bernie Sanders. The same Obama who called his GOP opponents “enemies” in the run up to the above-mentioned “shellacking.” They’ve said this about the Obama who’s first attempt at compromise as President was just a flat reminder that “I won.” The same Obama who pushed through life and death legislation on a strict party line vote, and abusing the bipartisan Byrd Rule to do it? The same Obama who, when faced for the first time by real opposition, put on the most petty and petulant press conference performance in presidential history. The same Obama who, just days later, walked out on another briefing, blaming his wife.
I could go on, but why? The “instinct” part is demonstrably false, and the evidence for Obama’s “demeanor” isn’t much stronger. The question is, where did this meme come from and why does the press keep insisting that it’s true?
I find the global warming, Jimmy Carter blames the Jooooos, and the worst-ever Monty Python impression — all on another exciting episode of… The Week in Blogs!
Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid could do themselves and the country a lot of good by brushing up on their Heinlein. Especially that Lazarus Long quip that “a motion to adjourn is always in order.”
California regulators Thursday voted to cap the greenhouse gas emissions of the state’s major industries and establish the nation’s first broad-based carbon trading program.
The move marks another bellwether moment for a state that has led in environmental policy, coming as national climate legislation to regulate greenhouse gases and curb climate change has stalled in Congress.
“This is an historic venture,” said Mary Nichols, chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board, as the panel voted 9 to 1 to approve some 3,000 pages of regulations and supporting documents, crafted over three years of intense negotiations with businesses and public interest groups.
The move is also being cheered by businesses in places as far away as Arizona and Nevada.
RELATED: Senator Jay Rockefeller is seeking to block the EPA’s power grab (pun entirely intentional), but he can’t do a damn thing to put a stop to California’s foolishness.
Via Roger, the Top Twenty Senate Earmarkers:
Cochran (R-MS) 230
Wicker (R-MS) 199
Murray (D-WA) 172
Harkin (D-IA) 152
Reid (D-NV) 129
Menendez (D-NJ) 123
Feinstein (D-CA) 121
Lautenberg (D-NJ) 120
Lincoln (D-AR) 114
Inouye (D-HI) 113
Schumer (D-NY) 106
Johnson (D-SD) 105
Landrieu (D-LA) 104
Specter (D-PA) 103
Pryor (D-AR) 96
Levin (D-MI) 93
Stabenow (D-MI) 91
Boxer (D-CA) 90
Brown (D-OH) 87
Grassley (R-IA) 86
Would any of these guys be missed?
Word Lens uses the video camera in your iPhone or iPod Touch to translate Spanish-to-English (or the other way around) in realtime, using augmented reality. That’s right, you take video and Word Lens instantly and automatically replaces the language it sees with the language you want to read — no network connection required. That kind of CGI used to be done by giant server farms in Hollywood during post-production. Now your phone does it for you effortlessly, anywhere.
The future just arrived.
Fred Kaplan summarizes the White House’s summary of its Afghan War review:
Six times in the course of five pages, the report’s authors note that, unless Pakistan does a better job of controlling its borders—the western tribal areas, where Taliban leaders find safe haven and move reinforcements and supplies into Afghanistan and back again—the U.S. military successes of recent months are for naught.
I never did understand the need for the Afghanistan Surge, nor the drawn-out ramp-up. And the will-we/won’t-we indecision on the drawdown this summer is yet another puzzling bit in our puzzling strategy.
Looking over my own links in the graf above, I guess it goes like this:
We’re doing fine in Afghanistan.
Unless we pull out.
Which we’re going to start doing this summer.
Unless we don’t.
There’s strategic ambiguity, and then there’s… this.
What’s up with Krauthammer? Last week, he made the case that maintaining GOP tax rates was somehow a Democrat stimulus, and I’m still scratching my head over that one. This week, while Obama was “holding no high cards, he nonetheless managed to resurface suddenly not just as a player but as orchestrator, dealmaker and central actor in a high $1 trillion drama.”
I’m scratching my head again. Obama, holding a veto pen and whose party still holds both houses of Congress for another two weeks, gave the GOP damn near everything it wanted — in exchange for extending unemployment benefits, which the Republicans were almost certainly going to do anyway. Obama got a bunch of pork, too, but that goes without saying. (See? I told you he wasn’t a Muslim.)
Oh, and the President made himself look small and petulant in the process.
If that’s triangulation, it certainly isn’t the Clintonian form. As Mickey Kaus noted, when Clinton triangulated, he fought the extremist on both sides to protect “the little guy” in the middle, there with Clinton. Or at least that’s how he presented himself — and Clinton was usually magnanimous in victory, too.
When Obama triangulates, the case he makes is, “I wanted what the left wants, but I couldn’t get it.” And he’s nasty about it. So Obama makes himself appear weak and petty.
So even if Krauthammer is right — and he’s a far sharper political thinker than I am, and much closer to the action, too — Obama’s act is going to wear thin, long before 2012. That is, if it hasn’t already.
How bad is it, really? Read on:
The decision to delay the debate is mired in procedural arcana, but the underlying issue is that Democratic opponents of the bill want to vote for an amendment changing the estate-tax without voting to approve the bill itself.
Did you catch that? Liberal Democrats are, to borrow a phrase, holding hostage those middle class tax rates so that they can support the bill without voting for it. Or maybe to vote for the bill without supporting it. Or maybe there’s some clever maneuver where the House can “deem it sucks” and send everybody home for Christmas.
Will Collier found… well, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.
Dana Milbank reports on the President’s Big Business Summit or Whatever:
The president was not about to answer questions because he didn’t want to do anything to upset the choreography of the day. It was a chance for Obama to show, in contrast to the perception that many voters had last month, that he is a big fan of the free market and private industry. And it was a chance to have a mostly friendly crowd of CEOs (there wasn’t an oil man or a health-insurance boss among them) validate Obama’s pro-business bona fides.
No, no, a thousand times, no. Nobody doubts that Obama is anti-business. Rent-seeking corporations and great big government go hand-in-hand. What we need is a President who is pro-markets.
And good luck with that.
Apparently, the TSA thinks there’s a “you have boobs” exception to the Fourth Amendment.
Just abolish the TSA and announce a do-over already. This organization is inept and willfully stupid right to its core.
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