Quote of the day

“Richard Nixon’s crimes were committed purely in the interest of his own political gain,” Mr. Wallace told Mr. Howard before an audience of a few hundred after viewing the filmmaker’s new film, “Frost/Nixon,” which is about the only U.S. president to resign from office.

“I think to compare what Nixon did, and the abuses of power for pure political self-preservation, to George W. Bush trying to protect this country — even if you disagree with rendition or waterboarding — it seems to me is both a gross misreading of history both then and now,” Mr. Wallace said.

Canada’s opposition tries a coup, of sorts

However, it’s a little mystifying.  Not only will the three parties combine to give Canadian voters what they clearly didn’t want, they’re going to yank control from Harper just when the economy is tanking.  A wiser opposition would allow Harper to stumble for a while, then call a national election and take the issue to the voters.  Instead, the opposition wants to take charge now — and potentially all of the blame for what follows.  In fact, they’ll also take the blame for taking control of the government and throwing its economic plans into turmoil.

Small wonder these guys lose elections.  I wouldn’t be too surprised to see Harper smiling at being taken off the hook in such a manner, and at the prospects of voter backlash when it falls apart.

Social Security and the market meltdown

In the wake of the stock market collapse, one theme emerged almost immediately — that derailing George Bush’s reform and privatization plans for Social Security saved retirees from disaster.  People saw the steep drop in stock prices over the last few weeks and figured that retirees would be eating cat food by Christmas. However, that ignores a couple of realities, and in fact we may wind up wishing we’d listened to Bush in the long run.

First, the people who were close to retirement weren’t eligible for privatization anyway.  In fact, the first stock purchases under the 2005 plan wouldn’t have been made until next year, and those only for people whose retirement dates were still years away.  Anyone within ten to fifteen years of retirement had to stick with Social Security with Bush’s transition proposal.  Having that money flowing into the markets now would have provided some welcome capital flow during a recession, and the portfolios could have bought some real bargains.

The bigger issue, I’m told, is the wage-growth assumptions made by economists to declare Social Security solvent in the first place.  The CBO’s analysis of SocSec’s insolvency date assumed a higher long-term growth than anything seen in the last 40 years in order to produce an insolvency date farther out than the one predicted by the Social Security Trust Fund trustees.  The financial collapse has proven those assumptions wildly optimistic and unreliable.  Not only that, but the Trust Fund itself has taken a big hit, thanks to a plunge in Treasury return rates.

The much-derided Trustees’ projections for cash flow deficits (2017) and insolvency (2041) are not going to prove to be wildly pessimistic.   More likely, the burst of the housing bubble will bring those dates significantly closer.  Not only will we wish that Congress had taken action with Bush to effect Social Security reform, we may have run out of time to get it done without putting people’s retirements at risk now.

In the meantime, let me share a couple of tables with you from the Social Security Administration.  The first shows the unfunded obligations just for past and current participants — with a $15 trillion shortfall.  The second shows that the Social Security shortfall is NOT a hypothetical, maybe-it-will-happen-someday event.  It’s on the books NOW in the form of the excess of benefit promises over revenue collected for people who have entered the system already.  Future generations don’t contribute to the problem at all — even if they get everything they’re promised, and even if they’re spared a tax increase (both impossible given the current shortfall), they’d put more into the system than they’d get from it, in present value terms.

Keep these tables and links handy. These tables may not survive the change in administration.

Soon after Bill Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, the former president and I had a brief telephone conversation. I had been downright heated about the...

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Reporter to Obama: Um, didn’t you belittle Hillary’s foreign policy cred during the primaries?

Sure he did, but you can’t hold him to things he said in the heat of battle. Remember, this is a guy who lied repeatedly on the stump about a pillar of American trade policy and then climbed down as soon as it was safe to do so. BS-ing about his contempt for Hillary’s qualifications is small potatoes by comparison.

Note Her Majesty nodding along at the beginning as Obama pointedly reaffirms that he’ll be the one setting policy. Lurking over her shoulder (literally, in some of the camera angles) is Susan Rice, who was originally touted for State or NSA and who’ll end up instead as ambassador to the UN — which The One now plans to make into a cabinet-level position. That’s significant for two reasons: (1) it signals to the public that he’s serious about “soft power” playing a vastly bigger role in his administration than it did in Bush’s, and (2) it signals to Hillary that if she steps out of line he has someone capable of replacing her without missing a beat. How capable? Maguire points out that while Rice is known for being hawkish on intervening against genocides, she had no problem with The One’s plan to pull out of Iraq notwithstanding the likely outcome. Which is just where Hillary stood at the time, except she was even blunter about it:

Asked if Americans would endure having troops in Iraq who do nothing to stop sectarian attacks there, Mrs. Clinton replied, “Look, I think the American people are done with Iraq. I think they’re at a point where, whether they thought it was a good idea or not, they have seen misjudgment and blunder after blunder, and their attitude is, what is this getting us? What is this doing for us?”

“No one wants to sit by and see mass killing,” she added. “It’s going on every day! Thousands of people are dying every month in Iraq. Our presence there is not stopping it. And there is no potential opportunity I can imagine where it could. This is an Iraqi problem — we cannot save the Iraqis from themselves. If we had a different attitude going in there, if we had stopped the looting immediately, if we had asserted our authority — you can go down the lines, if, if, if.”

I’m going to stop here before I talk myself out of supporting the pick again. Not shown in the video, incidentally: Joe Biden, who finally got to say a few words at one of these pressers because he is, of course, a foreign policy genius who got the surge just as wrong as Hillary did.

• Seeing President-elect Barack Obama as [6] Santa Claus, mayors have descended on Washington asking for $90 billion spending plan to fund local priorities.
• Analysts say [7] next year’s deficit could top $1 trillion and the economic rescue could cost $8.5 trillion.
• [8] Legions of lobbyists are lining up to cash in on the $700 billion stimulus Democrats are promising to give away.
• Obama’s expected pick of Tom Daschle to be secretary of Health and Human Services [9] contradicts his pledge to rid the White House of special interests.
• In light of new ethics charges, the Washington Post has joined the New York Times in [10] calling for Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) to step down as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.

Article printed from The Foundry: http://blog.heritage.org

URL to article: http://blog.heritage.org/2008/12/01/morning-bell-preventing-the-possible/

Bollywood as clueless as Hollywood

One might think that an attack like Mumbai just suffered, in which as many as 300 died, might tend to focus the minds of Indians on the true definition of terrorism.  Not according to Bollywood, India’s film industry, which apparently has more in common with Hollywood than just a clever twist on the name:

On the evening of Nov. 26, the biggest names in Bollywood walked the red carpet at the Bombay premiere of “The President Is Coming,” a comedy about six 20-somethings vying to win the right to shake hands with President Bush.

Among those in attendance at the star-studded premiere Wednesday evening was Bollywood’s “new heartthrob” Imran Khan, who proudly posed for paparazzi donning a T-shirt with Mr. Bush’s face sandwiched between the words “International Terrorist.”

Mr. Khan - a member of India’s Muslim minority - chose not to mock international terrorists who kill in the name of Allah. He and his co-religionists know the deadly results for those who do.

At the precise moment Mr. Khan and hundreds of others making their fortunes in the multibillion-dollar Indian movie business were watching “The President Is Coming,” only a few blocks away, 10 20-something Muslim extremists began a horrific three-day terror spree.

Azam Amir Kasab, the sole surviving terrorist, told his saviors, “I was told to kill to my last breath.” The 21-year-old Pakistani stated that the group’s goal was to kill 5,000 people. Overall, at least 174 people died and more than 300 were injured.

Andrew Breitbart reports that Khan wore this shirt despite the deaths of family members of other members of the Bollywood community.  Khan’s shirt may have been the most obvious evidence of cluelessness — and the most crass — but he was hardly alone.   They’re busy blaming the police for their ineptitude rather than the terrorists themselves (with some justification) while declaring the terrorists insane and demanding that the same authorities chase after them with butterfly nets rather than guns, which seems wildly contradictory to everyone outside of Bollywood … and Hollywood.