Federal President's Weekly Address

President Obama Hails Unprecedented G-20 Action to Address Global Economic Downturn

THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
_________________________________________________________________
EMBARGOED UNTIL 6:00 AM ET Saturday, April 4, 2009

WEEKLY ADDRESS: President Obama Hails Unprecedented G-20 Action to Address Global Economic Downturn

WASHINGTON – In his weekly address, President Barack Obama praised the agreement of the G-20 nations to act together as a turning point in this global economic slump. With the American economy inextricably linked to the global economy, global coordination is needed to restore lending, spur job growth, reform financial regulation and ultimately fix our economy. The President also discussed his meetings with Chinese President Hu, Russian President Medvedev, and America’s NATO allies.

The audio and video will be available at 6:00am Saturday, April 4, 2009 at www.whitehouse.gov.

Prepared Remarks of President Barack Obama Weekly Address
Saturday, April 4, 2009

In this new century, we live in a world that has grown smaller and more interconnected than at any time in history. Threats to our nation’s security and economy can no longer be kept at bay by oceans or by borders drawn on maps. The terrorists who struck our country on 9/11 plotted in Hamburg, trained in Kandahar and Karachi, and threaten countries across the globe. Cars in Boston and Beijing are melting ice caps in the Arctic that disrupt weather patterns everywhere. The theft of nuclear material from the former Soviet Union could lead to the extermination of any city on earth. And reckless speculation by bankers in New York and London has fueled a global recession that is inflicting pain on workers and families around the world and across America.

The challenges of our time threaten the peace and prosperity of every single nation, and no one nation can meet them alone. That is why it is sometimes necessary for a President to travel abroad in order to protect and strengthen our nation here at home. That is what I have done this week.

I began my trip by attending a summit of the G20 – the countries that represent the world’s largest economies – because we know that the success of America’s economy is inextricably linked to that of the global economy. If people in other countries cannot spend, that means they cannot buy the goods we produce here in America, which means more lost jobs and more families hurting. Just yesterday, we learned that we lost hundreds of thousands more jobs last month, adding to the millions we’ve lost since this recession began. And if we continue to let banks and other financial institutions around the world act recklessly and irresponsibly, that affects institutions here at home as credit dries up, and people can’t get loans to buy a home or car, to run a small business or pay for college.

Ultimately, the only way out of a recession that is global in scope is with a response that is global in coordination. That is why I’m pleased that after two days of careful negotiation, the G20 nations have agreed on a series of unprecedented steps that I believe will be a turning point in our pursuit of a global economic recovery. All of us are now moving aggressively to get our banks lending again. All of us are working to spur growth and create jobs. And all of us have agreed on the most sweeping reform of our financial regulatory framework in a generation – reform that will help end the risky speculation and market abuses that have cost so many people so much.

I also met this past week with the leaders of China and Russia, working to forge constructive relationships to address issues of common concern, while being frank with each other about where we disagree. President Hu and I agreed that the link between China’s economy and ours is of great mutual benefit, and we established a new Strategic and Economic Dialogue between the U.S. and China. President Medvedev and I discussed our shared commitment to a world without nuclear weapons, and we signed a declaration putting America and Russia on the path to a new treaty to further reduce our nuclear arsenals. Tomorrow, I will lay out additional steps we must take to secure the world’s loose nuclear materials and stop the spread of these deadly weapons.

Finally, I met yesterday with our NATO allies and asked them for additional civilian support and assistance for our efforts in Afghanistan. That is where al Qaeda trains, plots, and threatens to launch their next attack. And that attack could occur in any nation, which means that every nation has a stake in ensuring that our mission in Afghanistan succeeds.
As we have worked this week to find common ground and strengthen our alliances, we have not solved all of our problems. And we have not agreed on every point or every issue in every meeting. But we have made real and unprecedented progress – and will continue to do so in the weeks and months ahead.

Because in the end, we recognize that no corner of the globe can wall itself off from the threats of the twenty-first century, or from the needs and concerns of fellow nations. The only way forward is through shared and persistent efforts to combat fear and want wherever they exist. That is the challenge of our time. And if we move forward with courage and resolve, I am confident that we will meet this challenge.

Thank you.

Conservative: Obama's Attack Machine

Obama's Attack Machine. By Kimberley A Strassel
WSJ, Apr 03, 2009

The thing about fear is that you can see it. For an insight as to what the left today fears most, witness its attempted political assassination of Eric Cantor.

The 45-year-old Virginia congressman came to Washington in 2001, and by last year had been unanimously elected Republican Whip, under Minority Leader John Boehner. In recent months, Mr. Cantor has helped unify the GOP against much of President Barack Obama's agenda, in particular his blowout $787 billion stimulus, and yesterday, his blowout $3.6 trillion budget.

He's also one of the GOP's up-and-coming talents. Along with Wisconsin's Paul Ryan, or California's Kevin McCarthy, he represents a new guard, one that's sworn off earmarks and brought the conversation back to fiscal responsibility and economic opportunity. They've focused on party outreach, and are popular with younger voters and independents. They are big fund-raisers, part of a drive to recruit and elect more reformers. And they are on the rise.

All of which threatens the left. Democrats know their current dominance in Washington is in no small part due to public disillusionment with the GOP. They are also aware that their current tax-and-spend governance is creating plenty of opportunities for that opposition to remake itself. Thus the furious campaign -- waged by every blog, pundit, union, 527, and even the White House -- to kneecap Republicans who might help lead a makeover. Mr. Cantor is the top target.

This kicked off after the GOP's unanimous vote against the stimulus, which Democrats saw as an opening to brand Mr. Cantor as the public face of partisan opposition to the "bipartisan" president. The Virginian has in fact publicly reached out to the White House, and has been deeply involved in producing alternatives to administration policies. But never let the facts get in the way of a good smear.

Within days of the vote, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee was up with radio ads targeting 28 Republicans who'd voted no. Mr. Cantor was the only member of the House GOP leadership to get hit. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the big union, and Americans United for Change, the pro-Obama group, launched their own ads against 18 members, again singling out Mr. Cantor. The groups also ran a national TV spot sporting a picture of the whip with text that read "just saying no" -- which earned Mr. Cantor a new liberal nickname: Dr. No.

Mr. Obama joined in at his Fiscal Responsibility Summit. As the TV cameras rolled, he deliberately turned to the whip to say: "I'm going to keep on talking to Eric Cantor. Some day, sooner or later, he's going to say 'Boy, Obama had a good idea.'"

The Rush Limbaugh flap inspired a new AFSCME and American United for Change ad, accompanied by a statement that when Rush says jump, "Eric Cantor and other Republicans say 'how high.'" At nearly the precise moment Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel made Sunday news by claiming Mr. Limbaugh was rooting for Obama "failure," George Stephanopoulos (who, take note, has daily calls with Mr. Emanuel) demanded on his own show that Mr. Cantor tell him if this was indeed the GOP strategy. David Plouffe, the president's campaign wizard, followed up with an anti-Limbaugh screed for the Washington Post, zeroing in on that "new Republican quarterback Eric Cantor, who says "the GOP's strategy will be to 'Just Say No.'"

And then there's the echo chamber. MSNBC's Keith Olbermann is so obsessed with Mr. Cantor, he can barely find time to be indignant about anything else. Talking Points Memo, Huffington Post, Think Progress and other leading liberal blogs are today all-anti-Cantor-all-the-time.

But the real ugly was unleashed a few weeks ago, when the goon squad set on Mr. Cantor's wife. An outfit called Working Families Win began running robocalls in five districts noting that Diana Cantor was a "top executive" at a bank that had received bailout funds -- the clear implication being that Mr. Cantor's vote for said bailout hinged on this fact. "In the middle of the AIG scandal, our congressman [fill in the blank] voted to make Virginia Republican, Eric Cantor, the conservative leader in Congress," it droned (incoherently and incorrectly), before demanding voters oppose the "Cantor Family Bank bailout."

At least when Chuck Schumer ran ads targeting Republicans for voting for a "bailout" that his own party brought to the floor -- and passed -- he kept his attacks on the members. And the last anyone looked, the AIG intervention was being overseen by the Obama administration, not the House minority whip. This may set a new political low, not the least because Mrs. Cantor in fact works at a subsidiary of the bank in question. Not to mention that Mr. Cantor led the initial GOP revolt against the "bailout."

The Virginian has a new, high-profile job, and that means taking some knocks. Mr. Cantor is also where he is for a reason, and has so far weathered the onslaught. But the coordinated takedown attempt is yet more proof that the Obama-led Democrats aren't nearly as interested in changing the "tone" as they are in holding on to power.

Children's toys, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act and the lawmakers' intentions

Toys R Congress. WSJ Editorial
Ruining the kids motorcycle business
WSJ, Apr 03, 2009

Last year's Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act was supposed to make children safer by reducing the risk of lead poisoning in toys. Instead, the new law has become a case study in how hastily written regulation can club the economy and reduce consumer safety.

This bill was passed by wide margins in Congress and signed into law by President Bush in the aftermath of the controversy over lead paint in imported toys from China. The new law, which took effect in February, establishes strict limits on lead levels in products for children. Never mind that in 2008 only one American child was injured from lead poisoning from toys.

What few on Capitol Hill anticipated was how the new law would devastate the domestic toy industry. According to the American Toy Association, the new rules will cost retailers and toy makers an estimated $2 billion for compliance and removing children's products from the shelves even though they pose no real health threat. Even old children's books are being cleared from stores and libraries.

The multibillion-dollar children's motorcycle and all-terrain vehicle industry has been clobbered. Kids motorcross racing has boomed in recent years in rural and Western states. And the regulators at the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) have decided that virtually all of these youth vehicles violate the new standards because of lead in the brakes, tire valves and gears. They've ordered motorcycle dealers to stop selling them, putting hundreds of dealers and the entire motorcross industry in a depression. With one stroke of the regulatory pen, an estimated $100 million of inventory can't be sold, and the industry loss may reach $1 billion.

While safety concerns need to be paramount, there is virtually zero threat of lead poisoning from riding a motorcycle. One study by Dr. Barbara Beck of Harvard finds that a youth's intake of lead from riding a motorcycle is less than the amount from drinking water. Even the CPSC admits in a letter to Congress that the lead-intake risk from youth motorcycles is "remote at best."

The introduction in recent years of smaller cycles for kids under 12 has increased safety by replacing heavier cycles more prone to accident and more severe injury. According to a study by the Motorcycle Industry Council, "90% of the youth fatalities and injuries on motorcycles occur when kids ride adult vehicles." Those are what kids will ride if the CPSC ban stays in effect. Ken Luttrell, a Democratic state house member from Oklahoma, says, "With these new regulations, Washington has only succeeded in making biking much more dangerous for kids."

The inane regulations are leading to a backlash against Congress and the CPSC. A resolution calling for a year delay in implementing the new law so the industry has time to adjust passed the Oklahoma legislature 101-0 last week. Missouri and Nevada legislatures have passed similar resolutions. California's burgeoning cycle community is so enraged that some motorcycle dealers are openly defying the sales ban. On Wednesday a coalition of toy users and manufacturers held a rally in Washington to "stop the toy ban."

But so far the folks in Washington aren't interested in what families or employers think. Henry Waxman, a scourge of private business and ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, refuses even to hold hearings. Meanwhile, the Obama Administration has called for a major increase in the CPSC budget. Don't you feel safer already?

Fantasizing about capped 350 ppm CO2

Conference of the Century! (Fantasizing about capped 350 ppm CO2). By Marlo Lewis
Master Resource, March 30, 2009

Well, how else should we describe a conference addressing “The Greatest Challenge in History”? That’s what the 350 Climate Conference, to be held May 2 at Columbia University, calls global warming, which it also asserts is ”likely the greatest threat humanity has ever faced.”
The number “350″ refers to the “safe upper limit” of carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in the atmosphere–350 parts per million (ppm)–according to NASA scientist and Columbia University professor James Hansen, who will keynote the conference. Atmospheric CO2 levels today are roughly 385 ppm.

The online conference flyer explains:

While the exact limit–whether it be 550, 450, 350, or even lower–is subject to debate, the need for proactive strategies to climate change is clear. Vital issues directly relating to climate change, such as alternative energy and carbon sequestration, are likely to drive domestic and international policies for the decades and centuries to come. This conference will discuss the scientific, political, social and economic challenges and opportunities associated [with] reducing emissions and lowering atmospheric carbon levels.

Notice what’s missing from the program. There are “challenges and opportunities” associated wtih reducing emissions and lowering CO2 levels, but, apparently, no risks, no perils, no threats to humanity. That’s dishonest, daffy, or both.

For several years, the UN, the European Union, and numerous environmental groups have said that the world must reduce CO2 emissions 50% below 1990 levels by 2050 in order to “stabilize” atmospheric CO2 concentrations at 450 ppm by 2100.

Newsweek science reporter Sharon Begley (no skeptic she) interviewed Cal Tech chemist Nathan Lewis (no skeptic either) on what it would take just to keep atmospheric CO2 levels from reaching 450 ppm:

Lewis’s numbers show the enormous challenge we face. The world used 14 trillion watts (14 terawatts) of power in 2006. Assuming minimal population growth (to 9 billion people), slow economic growth (1.6 percent a year, practically recession level) and—this is key—unprecedented energy efficiency (improvements of 500 percent relative to current U.S. levels, worldwide), it will use 28 terawatts in 2050. (In a business-as-usual scenario, we would need 45 terawatts.) Simple physics shows that in order to keep CO2 to 450 ppm, 26.5 of those terawatts must be zero-carbon. That’s a lot of solar, wind, hydro, biofuels and nuclear, especially since renewables kicked in a measly 0.2 terawatts in 2006 and nuclear provided 0.9 terawatts. Are you a fan of nuclear? To get 10 terawatts, less than half of what we’ll need in 2050, Lewis calculates, we’d have to build 10,000 reactors, or one every other day starting now. Do you like wind? If you use every single breeze that blows on land, you’ll get 10 or 15 terawatts. Since it’s impossible to capture all the wind, a more realistic number is 3 terawatts, or 1 million state-of-the art turbines, and even that requires storing the energy—something we don’t know how to do—for when the wind doesn’t blow. Solar? To get 10 terawatts by 2050, Lewis calculates, we’d need to cover 1 million roofs with panels every day from now until then. “It would take an army,” he says. Obama promised green jobs, but still.*

The point? In Begley’s words, “We can’t get there from here: Political will and a price on CO2 won’t be enough” to stabilize emissions at 450 ppm. The UN/EU emission reduction target is unattainable absent “Nobel caliber breakthroughs.” Meeting the target will require “revolutionary changes in the technology of energy production, distribution, storage, and conversion,” as one group of energy experts wrote back in 2002.

Now, if those breakthroughs do not occur, then the only way to bring the world into compliance with the UN/EU goal envisioned for Kyoto II would be to deny large segments of humanity the blessings of affordable energy. As I observed in an earlier post, there is nothing quite like economic collapse to cut emissions.

Now recall that the emission stabilization goal of the 350 Climate Conference is 100 ppm lower than the EU/UN goal. In a paper on his Web page, Lewis says that achieving 350 ppm by mid-century would require world CO2 emissions to drop to zero by that date.

There is no known way to get there except draconian cutbacks in economic output, population, or both. Poverty is of course a perenniel source of conflict within and among nations as well as the leading cause of preventable disease and premature death. Moreover, climate policies punitive enough to induce negative economic and population growth are likely to meet with resistance and promote conflict rather than peace.

Will any of the invited speakers at the 350 Conference address these risks in a serious ways? Not unless he (or she) is brave enough to be the skunk at the garden party and endure abuse from those who denounce dissent as villainy and treason.

* See also my colleague Iain Murray’s blog on Begley’s column.

Not one, but two hagiographies of Edward Kennedy in The Boston Globe

Camelost, by Philip Terzian
Not one, but two hagiographies of Edward Kennedy.
The Weekly Standard, Mar 30, 2009, Volume 014, Issue 27

Last Lion
The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy, by the Boston Globe
edited by Peter S. Canellos
Simon & Schuster, 480 pp., $28

Ted Kennedy
Scenes from an Epic Life, by the Boston Globe
Simon & Schuster, 208 pp., $28

It is, perhaps, fitting that, as metropolitan newspapers fade from the scene, the Boston Globe should remind us why this is happening by producing not one but two hagiographies of Edward Kennedy. The 77-year-old Kennedy is mortally ill, and certainly entitled to the victory lap he is taking in the political culture; but these two portentous volumes--the dimensions of the second, Ted Kennedy: Scenes from an Epic Life, are ideal for coffee tables--tell us considerably more about the Globe than about Senator Kennedy.

First, there is the "last lion" business. Kennedy has long since grown accustomed to being referred to in the press as the "liberal lion" of the Senate--fair enough--but now that his days in office are numbered, the cliché machine has anointed him the "last lion," the last of a vanishing breed, the last giant to stalk the corridors of the Senate, we shall not see his like again, and so on.
Oh, please. The last time this phrase was employed in a book title, by the late William Manchester, the subject was Winston Churchill. Surely the Globe isn't drawing a comparison? More to the point, when Leverett Saltonstall, a far more distinguished representative of Massachusetts, retired from office in 1967 after 30 years' service as governor and senator, and at the same age as Kennedy, the Globe failed to serve up a worshipful account of his career. Of course, Saltonstall was a Republican.

Moreover, since the dawn of the republic, the Senate has been routinely populated with "last lions," many of whom--Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, John Sherman, Robert La Follette, Henry Cabot Lodge, George Norris, Richard Russell, Hubert Humphrey, et al.--left a far more significant mark on the politics of their times than Edward Kennedy. In statesmanship, as in life, there is a qualitative difference between longevity and distinction, and Edward Kennedy's primary distinction--apart from his ex officio fame as a Kennedy--has been his election, and subsequent multiple reelections, by the voters of Massachusetts.

Then there is the fundamental dishonesty of the Globe's approach. Ted Kennedy is what used to be called a lip-reader's book--lots of pictures and informative captions, separated by easy-to-read blocks of anodyne text--and certainly slick by the standards of the trade. But Last Lion purports to be a serious account of Kennedy's career, and his impact on American history. This would have been easier to accomplish if the Globe writers had undertaken an objective assessment of their subject, but that is not the intent here. The point of Last Lion is to transform Kennedy's undistinguished tenure in the Senate, and his thwarted ambition in national politics, into a kind of virtual triumph. To be sure, to pull it off would require the narrative skills of a gymnast--to twist the facts to shape the thesis--and the Globe writers are only newspapermen.

Edward Kennedy was the youngest of the nine children of Joseph and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, and lost in the family shuffle, below the radar of his father's maniacal ambition. He was famously expelled from Harvard for hiring a substitute to take a Spanish exam; but unlike his elder brothers, he held his own on the football team. In 1962, having barely reached the constitutional age to serve, he was elected to his brother John's Senate seat, which had been kept warm during the intervening two years by a faithful family retainer. In the general election he defeated the estimable George Lodge, a victory for the Irish mafia over Brahmin Boston; but it was in the bitter Democratic primary that his rival, Edward McCormack, pronounced the words that would haunt Kennedy ever afterwards: "If your name were Edward Moore instead of Edward Moore Kennedy, your candidacy would be a farce."

The great fulcrum of Kennedy's career, of course, is Chappaquiddick. Before 1969 he was a plausible Democratic aspirant for the presidency, and was climbing the greasy pole of Senate influence. After 1969 he was demoted in the Senate hierarchy by, of all people, Robert Byrd; and his 1980 campaign against a sitting Democratic president remains a classic in the annals of political egotism and self-destruction.

Here is where the Globe's ingenuity is put to the test. Instead of recognizing that Kennedy's political future perished with Mary Jo Kopechne, and that's that, Last Lion argues that the death of his presidential ambitions "liberated" Kennedy to dominate the Senate--and by inference, his times.

This is complete nonsense. Kennedy's rear-guard warfare against a resurgent conservatism in the 1980s and '90s--most notably his personal assault on Judge Robert Bork--was purely reactionary. There is no major legislation, certainly nothing resembling a political philosophy, associated with Kennedy's name. And for all his passion in repeating Theodore Sorensen's sonorous prose, his most famous pronouncement is his incoherent response to Roger Mudd's innocuous question, "Why do you want to be president?"

Philip Terzian is the literary editor of The Weekly Standard.

Conservatives, Public Schools, and Pedagogy

Conservatives, Public Schools, and Pedagogy. By Andrew J. Coulson
Cato at Liberty, Apr 01, 2009

I’ve received a fair bit of e-mail in response to my commentary yesterday on the recent defunding of the Bush administration’s Reading First program. Several people questioned my assertion that the program failed to yield a significant nationwide improvement in literacy. I cited a 2008 federal government report in support of that assertion, but questions were raised as to the validity of that study and other research seeming to contradict it was presented.

Taking the latter point first, it was pointed out that an EDS study of California found a positive impact to the program, as did an NWREL study of 5 other Western states. Note that there is not necessarily any contradiction between the federal study and the California and Western states studies. It’s possible that, nationwide, Reading First was associated with academic improvements in some schools, no effect in others, and lower performance in still others, resulting in the overall lack of impact reported by the federal government study. If so, it could be that schools in which Reading First proved effective are unevenly distributed around the country, and happen to be concentrated in the West.

Another possibility is that the federal study was so flawed that it failed to find a significant positive effect to Reading First when there actually was one. For the sake of argument, let’s say that this is true and that Reading First is actually working, overall, at improving student literacy nationwide. If so, what confidence should we have that it would continue to be effectively implemented in the long term, and not displaced by something else, or altered so as to become ineffective?

The answer is: not much. As I’ve noted in the case of the Follow Through experiment of the 60s and 70s, which is typical, even when a proven method is adopted in public school classrooms and yields great success it tends to be discarded for one reason or another. Since nothing fundamental has changed in the incentive structure of public schooling since the 1970s, there is no reason to believe that Reading First would buck the trend and somehow survive in perpetutity.

But all of this is of course academic, because Congress has already defunded the program. Democrats were not interested in continuing to evaluate the program to make absolutely sure of its impact. They killed it almost immediately because it is a traditionalist pedgaogical program that appeals to conservatives rather than “progressives.”

And that was the second point of my commentary: even when effective methods are implemented in public schools they remain subject to the inconstant winds of politics. If you want to find fields where better methods roiutinely displace worse ones rather than vice versa, you have to look to the free enterprise sector of the economy. Without the freedoms and incentives of the marketplace, stagnation and declining productivity are the norm. Education is no different in this regard from any other field.

And just to be clear, I am convinced by the earlier research that the pedagogical ideas behind Reading First are sound, and that when properly implemented its systematic use of phonics is superior to most of what it would have displaced. I’m simply pointing out that there was never good reason to expect a government-protected monopoly consistently implement it effecitvely, and that even if it did for some period of time Reading First would eventually have fallen victim to shifting political winds. While some may choose to disagree on the first point, the second has already come to pass.

If we want schools around the country to continually adopt and refine the best methods available, we must create the freedoms and incentives that will cause that to happen… or get used to disappointment.

Robbing the Pentagon to Pay Foggy Bottom

Robbing the Pentagon to Pay Foggy Bottom, by Jamie Fly
The Weekly Standard Blog, March 23, 2009 12:16 PM

After initially falling for the administration’s rhetoric that the $533 billion they were allocating for the Defense Department in the Fiscal Year 2010 budget represented an increase over the Bush administration’s final budget (an argument skillfully deconstructed by Tom Donnelly), the press now seems to have woken up to the fact that the administration has something different in mind. Recent press reports provide a rather disturbing preview of the administration’s plans for the defense budget and preparations to use Secretary Gates as a human shield of sorts to counter expected criticism from defense contractors and Republicans in Congress. It seems Gates’ role in the ongoing Pentagon review is so key that he has decided to skip the NATO summit in early April so he can devote himself to his “efforts to strategically rebalance the department’s budget.”

The administration’s plan to get us to European levels of defense spending by 2016 comes at the same time as reports that the Chinese government stated that its official defense budget will jump by 14.9 percent this year (who knows how high the actual amounts are) and an announcement by Russian President Medvedev that Russia will undertake a “large-scale rearming” by 2011 given that “there are a range of regions where there remains serious potential for conflicts.”

There are a multitude of reasons that cutting defense at this juncture is a bad idea. The systems reportedly on the chopping block include a new Navy destroyer, the Air Force’s F-22, Army ground-combat vehicles, and possibly aircraft carriers, all integral elements of our ability to project power and defend our allies. Missile defense, now out of favor because it is unpopular in Moscow, is expected to take a significant hit as well. One can debate the merits of each of these systems or programs, but these cuts will result in thousands of job losses -- an inconvenient fact that may wake up some Democratic members of Congress who seem willing to throw money at failing banks and insurance companies but not at the Pentagon.

But beyond the programs and systems, the administration’s budget offers insight into its mentality about national security. Listen to some Democratic budget experts and you hear phrases like a “return to normalcy” used to describe the administration’s plans for defense spending. In this “normal” world, there is no mention of 9/11, or of the fact that countries such as Russia and China still threaten our allies and our interests. Military commitments in the Middle East or South Asia 5-10 years from now, what military commitments?

The difficulty for Republicans who wish to oppose these cuts is that for the last four years, key figures in the Bush administration helped set the stage for the Obama defense budget we now have in front of us. It became a fad during the second Bush term to deliver speeches in front of the foreign policy establishment or delivery testimony and warn about the “militarization” of U.S. foreign policy. Secretaries Rice and Gates and eventually Chairman Mullen all participated in this group therapy session played out in public. Many on the left pounced on these comments and today use them to justify cuts to defense to help pay for an increase in funding for a supposedly struggling State Department.

It is true that in recent years the U.S. military has all too often been asked to conduct missions they have not been trained for and probably should not be doing, but that is not a reason to cut defense spending. Nor is it a reason to expand the Foreign Service at the cost of the F-22 or missile defense. Our allies in Central and Eastern Europe and in Asia want American boots on the ground as a sign of our commitment to their defense, not more diplomats in pinstripes and wingtips.

While Secretary Gates is meeting with the green eyeshade crowd at the Pentagon in early April instead of enjoying a glass of Riesling in Strasbourg-Kehl at the NATO Summit, he may want to think long and hard about whether he wants to become the chief advocate for a defense budget that will undermine, not strengthen our long term security.

DLC: On behalf of the nation’s children, Obama is prepared to take on members of his own party and the special interests

Education reform is a defining issue. By Harold Ford Jr
Politico, Mar 26, 2009 @4:36 AM ED

President Barack Obama’s recent speech on education reform demonstrates that he is willing to put the full weight of his office behind fixing our failing schools. He called for higher standards, more charter schools, merit pay and eliminating bad teachers. When many of our urban school districts are graduating only 25 percent to 50 percent of their students, he knows that the failed methods and orthodoxies must be jettisoned for what will work.

The brave new world of the 21st century demands much more from our children. Obama’s ambitious and sweeping agenda will help educate and equip them to make the most of the opportunities created by an integrated global economy.

While there is a broad national consensus for education reform in the country, Obama expects that special interests will oppose his reform agenda. Those who do will fight vigilantly to hold onto the failed schools that shame us as a nation.

But their actions will put them against the best interests of our children and on the wrong side of history. Teachers unions and education groups have expressed opposition in the past to ideas like merit pay and charter schools. They are strongly opposed to a successful voucher program in Washington, D.C., which tragically was killed by Senate Democrats in the omnibus spending bill that passed the Senate last week.

On behalf of the nation’s children, Obama is prepared to take on members of his own party and the special interests. Along with turning around the economy, education reform could become the defining issue of his presidency.

Toward that end, the president and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan should consider hosting an education reform summit at the White House. The focus could be on what is working in public schools around the country. This list of “best practices” should be studied, evaluated and shared with principals and teachers — especially in schools that are underperforming.

He could invite education groups, teachers unions, principals, teachers and education leaders who have a proven record of reform and inform them how they could qualify for federal funding for programs that comply with the policy ideas of the Obama administration.

The genius of America is that we have always been able to overcome the challenges we face. Acknowledging our failures and focusing on methods and programs that have succeeded in educating our children are the best place to start.

It is also time we wake the sleeping giant: the parents who have children attending public schools. Alexis de Tocqueville said that people in a democracy “reign supreme.” The parents of public schoolchildren have never fully realized the power they have to bring change to underperforming schools.

With the financial support of the nation’s leading charitable foundations, Parent Teacher Associations around the country could be transformed into a national grass-roots effort to advocate for reform of our schools. Patterned after the missionary zeal and political sophistication of the Children’s Defense Fund, PTAs could be organized in school districts nationwide. Parents — motivated by wanting a world-class education for their children and being highly informed and organized — could bring persistent pressure to members of Congress to adopt an agenda of change to fix our failing schools.

What is at stake is nothing less than the American dream. To pass it on to our children and generations to come, we must restore quality and innovation to all our schools. President Obama knows that our legacy of excellence in education must be redeemed and, with his speech a couple of weeks ago, he has set us on a course to give our children the knowledge and skills they need to compete in this new and changing world.

As Americans, it’s time we think of our obligations to each other. It’s time we take seriously our collective responsibility for future generations. Providing our children — regardless of race, class or religion — with a world-class education is what binds us together and will make our country stronger.

President Obama’s plan to reform our schools will help our children live up to their God-given potential. We don’t have a moment to lose. Congress should enact his education reform proposal this year.

Former Rep. Harold Ford Jr. (D-Tenn.) is chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council.

A Maker of History: John Hope Franklin, 1915-2009

A Maker of History. WaPo Editorial
John Hope Franklin, 1915-2009
WaPo, Thursday, March 26, 2009; 20

Among scholars of the American past, John Hope Franklin, who died Wednesday at 94, was a rarity: He not only studied history; he made it. This should not have been necessary. But the culture into which Mr. Franklin was born in 1915 was distorted by racial discrimination. As a young African American pursuing a Harvard doctorate in history, he had to overcome not only the normal rigors of academia, but also racial insults -- the most stinging of which might have been the fact that American history, as it had been written until then, basically omitted people of color. And so, at a time when it took courage for him to visit certain libraries, Mr. Franklin set out to correct the record. "My challenge," Mr. Franklin once said, "was to weave into the fabric of American history enough of the presence of blacks so that the story of the United States could be told adequately and fairly."

His magisterial study of the American black experience, "From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans," was a revelation when it appeared in 1947 -- to be followed by books and articles on Reconstruction, the martial culture of the antebellum South, runaway slaves and many other subjects. Each one is a model of graceful prose, meticulously documented and free of bias or cant. The quality of Mr. Franklin's writings made him the first black chairman of a history department at a predominantly white institution, Brooklyn College, in 1956. Later came appointments at the University of Chicago and Duke, and teaching assignments at Howard and Cambridge universities and elsewhere. Along the way he assisted Thurgood Marshall's legal team in Brown v. Board of Education, served in government and accumulated more academic honors than we have space to mention. In 1995, President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Ever the mild-mannered academic, Mr. Franklin tended orchids at his Durham, N.C., home. But he never lost his outrage at the injustice he and other blacks had experienced. Toward the end of his life, he spoke of the need for the United States to apologize for the historical wrongs of slavery and segregation and compensate the victims. "I don't see any reason why I should get over that kind of exploitation," he told an interviewer. Yet he also called on young African Americans to make the most of their opportunities, notwithstanding residual racism. Last year, as then-candidate Barack Obama neared the presidency, Mr. Franklin found himself swept up in the excitement of a campaign that brought together whites and blacks "like this is a natural thing," as he put it in an interview with The Post. In his long and extraordinarily productive life, Mr. Franklin himself did much to bring about new attitudes and new possibilities. By changing his country's perception of itself, Mr. Franklin changed his country.

WSJ Editorial Page: Obama's AIG Panic

Obama's AIG Panic. WSJ Editorial
WSJ, Mar 19, 2009


The AIG Beltway bonfire continued yesterday with the spectacle of Ed Liddy, AIG's government-appointed CEO, enduring the wrath of Congress for embarrassing the Members with post-bailout bonuses. What we now have is a full-blown political panic ignited by no less than President Obama himself that is threatening to engulf his attempts to revive the financial system, and is undermining confidence in his leadership. This is no way to promote an economic recovery.

As recently as Sunday morning, White House economist Larry Summers was saying the bonuses were regrettable but there wasn't much that could be done to stop them. "We are a country of law. There are contracts. The government cannot just abrogate contracts," he said, with great good sense. Assorted Congressmen then did what comes naturally, which is declare their mock outrage. Rather than keep his legendary cool, Mr. Obama and the White House panicked as well and joined the braying pack.

Speaking on Monday of the $165 million paid to members of AIG's Financial Products division, the President asked, "How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping this company afloat?" Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who had known about the bonuses, was also trotted out to express his "outrage" and declare that Treasury would somehow try to claw back the bonuses. By shouting "greed" in a crowded and panicky Washington, our supposed financial stewards thus gave license to everyone in the media and Capitol Hill to see who could claim to be most shocked and appalled at AIG.

We've now got a full-fledged mob on our hands, with Congress looking to string up bankers in whatever bunker they can be found. Senators Chuck Grassley and Max Baucus want to double the current income tax on these bonuses, to 70% from 35%, and that's one of the more reasonable proposals. Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, the Democrat from silk-stocking Manhattan, wants to tax it all -- at 100%.

Senator Chris Dodd, down in the 2010 election polls after his sweetheart Countrywide mortgages, is busy rewriting the TARP compensation limits he only recently stuck in the stimulus bill. His last-minute measure explicitly exempted from compensation limits bonuses agreed to prior to the passage of the stimulus bill: "The prohibition required under clause (i) shall not be construed to prohibit any bonus payment required to be paid pursuant to a written employment contract executed on or before February 11, 2009 . . ." So Senator Hedge Fund is suddenly morphing into Huey Long to save his career.

This is all too much even for Rep. Charlie Rangel, the House's chief tax writer, who says the tax code shouldn't be deployed as a "political weapon." He's right. AIG's managers may be this week's political target of choice, but the message to every banker in America, indeed every business in America, is that you could be next. At least we haven't yet seen the resolution that was proposed in the English parliament, in 1720 in the aftermath of the South Sea bubble, that bankers be tied in sacks filled with snakes and tipped into the Thames. But it's still early days.

One consequence will be that every bank executive in America will try to repay his Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, money as rapidly as possible. The political punishment for accepting public money is becoming higher than the benefits of the extra capital cushion. According to Wells Fargo Chairman Richard Kovacevich, "If we were not forced to take the TARP money, we would have been able to raise private capital." On Tuesday, Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis joined the rush for the TARP exits, saying he hoped to pay back the $45 billion BofA has received by 2010 if not sooner. It's hard to argue with the sentiment.

For the larger banking system, however, this is exactly the wrong time to be shedding capital. The main point of the TARP was to backstop the financial system against systemic failure. Treasury botched the roll out and the execution, but with the economy still in recession and housing prices still falling, banking losses will surely grow. Mr. Geithner has projected the need for more than $1 trillion more in public capital, and the FDIC has asked Congress to increase its credit line to as much as $500 billion.

If we're lucky, the banks will be able to use today's steep yield curve to earn their way out of this mess, but no one can be sure and before this is over the FDIC and Treasury are going to need more public capital to protect depositors of failed institutions. The last thing we need is for this year's political panic to recreate the circumstances for another financial panic like the one we had last fall.

The Beltway's banker baiting seems to increase in direct proportion to the government's incompetence in nurturing a financial recovery. Anger rises when Americans learn after three bailout revisions that they haven't been told the truth that the AIG nationalization was a conduit to save counterparties, and even hedge funds, that gambled on housing. Only two weeks ago, Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Donald Kohn told Congress he couldn't disclose who AIG's counterparties were. Americans also wonder why taxpayer guarantees should be provided to Citigroup, a three-time loser, but with little accountability for the board and managers who brought the company low.

Reviving a financial system is a long process that requires a combination of capital support, workout ability and discipline for mistakes. The public has to believe the end result will be a better, sturdier system in return for taxpayer support, while at the same time being assured that gamblers aren't saved from their own mistakes.

If this balance is beyond the ability of Mr. Obama's current economic team, he needs a better team. The worst mistake he can make is to deflect attention away from government's mistakes by joining the attack on the very bankers he needs to lead an economic recovery. That's how a deep recession becomes a Depression.

Federal President secretly ends program that let pilots carry guns

Guns on a plane. Washington Times Editorial
Obama secretly ends program that let pilots carry guns
The Washington Times, Tuesday, March 17, 2009

After the September 11 attacks, commercial airline pilots were allowed to carry guns if they completed a federal-safety program. No longer would unarmed pilots be defenseless as remorseless hijackers seized control of aircraft and rammed them into buildings.

Now President Obama is quietly ending the federal firearms program, risking public safety on airlines in the name of an anti-gun ideology.

The Obama administration this past week diverted some $2 million from the pilot training program to hire more supervisory staff, who will engage in field inspections of pilots.

This looks like completely unnecessary harassment of the pilots. The 12,000 Federal Flight Deck Officers, the pilots who have been approved to carry guns, are reported to have the best behavior of any federal law enforcement agency. There are no cases where any of them has improperly brandished or used a gun. There are just a few cases where officers have improperly used their IDs.

Fewer than one percent of the officers have any administrative actions brought against them and, we are told, virtually all of those cases “are trumped up.”

Take a case against one flight officer who had visited the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles within the last few weeks. While there, the pilot noticed that federal law enforcement officers can, with the approval of a superior, obtain a license plate that cannot be traced, a key safety feature for law enforcement personnel. So the pilot asked if, as a member of the federal program, he was eligible. The DMV staffer checked and said “no.” The next day administrative actions were brought against the pilot for “misrepresenting himself.” These are the kinds of cases that President Obama wants to investigate.

Since Mr. Obama's election, pilots have told us that the approval process for letting pilots carry guns on planes slowed significantly. Last week the problem went from bad to worse. Federal Flight Deck Officers - the pilots who have been approved to carry guns - indicate that the approval process has stalled out.

Pilots cannot openly speak about the changing policies for fear of retaliation from the Transportation Security Administration. Pilots who act in any way that causes a “loss of confidence” in the armed pilot program risk criminal prosecution as well as their removal from the program. Despite these threats, pilots in the Federal Flight Deck Officers program have raised real concerns in multiple interviews.

Arming pilots after Sept. 11 was nothing new. Until the early 1960s, American commercial passenger pilots on any flight carrying U.S. mail were required to carry handguns. Indeed, U.S. pilots were still allowed to carry guns until as recently as 1987. There are no records that any of these pilots (either military or commercial) ever causing any significant problems.

Screening of airplane passengers is hardly perfect. While armed marshals are helpful, the program covers less than 3 percent of the flights out of Washington D.C.'s three airports and even fewer across the country. Sky marshals are costly and quit more often than other law-enforcement officers.

Armed pilots are a cost-effective backup layer of security. Terrorists can only enter the cockpit through one narrow entrance, and armed pilots have some time to prepare themselves as hijackers penetrate the strengthened cockpit doors. With pilots, we have people who are willing to take on the burden of protecting the planes for free. About 70 percent of the pilots at major American carriers have military backgrounds.

Frankly, as a matter of pure politics, we cannot understand what the administration is thinking. Nearly 40 House Democrats are in districts were the NRA is more popular than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. We can't find any independent poll in which the public is demanding that pilots disarm. Why does this move make sense?

Only anti-gun extremists and terrorist recruits are worried about armed pilots. So why is the Obama administration catering to this tiny lobby at the expense of public safety?

Why the GOP Can't Win With Minorities

Why the GOP Can't Win With Minorities. By Shelby Steele
WSJ, Mar 16, 2009

Today conservatism is stigmatized in our culture as an antiminority political philosophy. In certain quarters, conservatism is simply racism by another name. And minorities who openly identify themselves as conservatives are still novelties, fish out of water.

Yet there is now the feeling that without an appeal to minorities, conservatism is at risk of marginalization. The recent election revealed a Republican Party -- largely white, male and Southern -- seemingly on its way to becoming a "regional" party. Still, an appeal targeted just at minorities -- reeking as it surely would of identity politics -- is anathema to most conservatives. Can't it be assumed, they would argue, that support of classic principles -- individual freedom and equality under the law -- constitutes support of minorities? And, given the fact that blacks and Hispanics often poll more conservatively than whites on most social issues, shouldn't there be an easy simpatico between these minorities and political conservatism?

But of course the reverse is true. There is an abiding alienation between the two -- an alienation that I believe is the great new challenge for both modern conservatism and formerly oppressed minorities. Oddly, each now needs the other to evolve.

Yet why this alienation to begin with? Can it be overcome?

I think it began in a very specific cultural circumstance: the dramatic loss of moral authority that America suffered in the 1960s after openly acknowledging its long mistreatment of blacks and other minorities. Societies have moral accountability, and they cannot admit to persecuting a race of people for four centuries without losing considerable moral legitimacy. Such a confession -- honorable as it may be -- virtually calls out challenges to authority. And in the 1960s challenges emerged from everywhere -- middle-class white kids rioted for "Free Speech" at Berkeley, black riots decimated inner cities across the country, and violent antiwar protests were ubiquitous. America suddenly needed a conspicuous display of moral authority in order to defend the legitimacy of its institutions against relentless challenge.

This was the circumstance that opened a new formula for power in American politics: redemption. If you could at least seem to redeem America of its past sins, you could win enough moral authority to claim real political power. Lyndon Johnson devastated Barry Goldwater because -- among other reasons -- he seemed bent on redeeming America of its shameful racist past, while Goldwater's puritanical libertarianism precluded his even supporting the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Johnson's Great Society grandly advertised a new American racial innocence. If it utterly failed to "end poverty in our time," it succeeded -- through a great display of generosity toward minorities and the poor -- in recovering enough moral authority to see the government through the inexorable challenges of the '60s.

When redemption became a term of power, "redemptive liberalism" was born -- a new activist liberalism that gave itself a "redemptive" profile by focusing on social engineering rather than liberalism's classic focus on individual freedom. In the '60s there was no time to allow individual freedom to render up the social good. Redemptive liberalism would proactively engineer the good. Name a good like "integration," and then engineer it into being through a draconian regimen of school busing. If the busing did profound damage to public education in America, it gave liberals the right to say, "At least we did something!" In other words, we are activists against America's old sin of segregation. Activism is moral authority in redemptive liberalism.

But conservatism sees moral authority more in a discipline of principles than in activism. It sees ideas of the good like "diversity" as mere pretext for the social engineering that always leads to unintended and oppressive consequences. Conservatism would enforce the principles that ensure individual freedom, and then allow "the good" to happen by "invisible hand."

And here is conservatism's great problem with minorities. In an era when even failed moral activism is redemptive -- and thus a source of moral authority and power -- conservatism stands flat-footed with only discipline to offer. It has only an invisible hand to compete with the activism of the left. So conservatism has no way to show itself redeemed of America's bigoted past, no way like the Great Society to engineer a grand display of its innocence, and no way to show deference to minorities for the oppression they endured. Thus it seems to be in league with that oppression.

Added to this, American minorities of color -- especially blacks -- are often born into grievance-focused identities. The idea of grievance will seem to define them in some eternal way, and it will link them atavistically to a community of loved ones. To separate from grievance -- to say simply that one is no longer racially aggrieved -- will surely feel like an act of betrayal that threatens to cut one off from community, family and history. So, paradoxically, a certain chauvinism develops around one's sense of grievance. Today the feeling of being aggrieved by American bigotry is far more a matter of identity than of actual aggrievement.

And this identity calls minorities to an anticonservative orientation to American politics. It makes for an almost ancestral resistance to conservatism. One's identity of grievance is flattered by the moral activism of the left and offended by the invisible hand of the right. Minorities feel they were saved from oppression by the left's activism, not by the right's discipline. The truth doesn't matter much here (in fact it took both activism and principle, civil war and social movement, to end this oppression). But activism indicates moral anguish in whites, and so it constitutes the witness minorities crave. They feel seen, understood. With the invisible hand the special case of their suffering doesn't count for much, and they go without witness.

So here stands contemporary American conservatism amidst its cultural liabilities and, now, its electoral failures -- with no mechanism to redeem America of its shames, atavistically resisted by minorities, and vulnerable to stigmatization as a bigoted and imperialistic political orientation. Today's liberalism may stand on decades of failed ideas, but it is failure in the name of American redemption. It remains competitive with -- even ascendant over -- conservatism because it addresses America's moral accountability to its past with moral activism. This is the left's great power, and a good part of the reason Barack Obama is now the president of the United States. No matter his failures -- or the fruitlessness of his extravagant and scatter-gun governmental activism -- he redeems America of an ugly past. How does conservatism compete with this?

The first impulse is to moderate. With "compassionate conservatism" and "affirmative access" and "faith-based initiatives," President George W. Bush tried to show a redemptive conservatism that could be activist against the legacy of America's disgraceful past. And it worked electorally by moderating the image of conservatives as uncaring disciplinarians. But in the end it was only a marketer's ploy -- a shrewd advertisement with no actual product to sell.

What drew me to conservatism years ago was the fact that it gave discipline a slightly higher status than virtue. This meant it could not be subverted by passing notions of the good. It could be above moral vanity. And so it made no special promises to me as a minority. It neglected me in every way except as a human being who wanted freedom. Until my encounter with conservatism I had only known the racial determinism of segregation on the one hand and of white liberalism on the other -- two varieties of white supremacy in which I could only be dependent and inferior.

The appeal of conservatism is the mutuality it asserts between individual and political freedom, its beautiful idea of a free man in a free society. And it offers minorities the one thing they can never get from liberalism: human rather than racial dignity. I always secretly loved Malcolm X more than Martin Luther King Jr. because Malcolm wanted a fuller human dignity for blacks -- one independent of white moral wrestling. In a liberalism that wants to redeem the nation of its past, minorities can only be ciphers in white struggles of conscience.

Liberalism's glamour follows from its promise of a new American innocence. But the appeal of conservatism is relief from this supercilious idea. Innocence is not possible for America. This nation did what it did. And conservatism's appeal is that it does not bank on the recovery of lost innocence. It seeks the discipline of ordinary people rather than the virtuousness of extraordinary people. The challenge for conservatives today is simply self-acceptance, and even a little pride in the way we flail away at problems with an invisible hand.

Mr. Steele is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

WaPo: Mr. Obama's next step on stem cell research

A Moral Stand. WaPo Editorial
Mr. Obama's next step on stem cell research
Sunday, March 15, 2009; A18

PRESIDENT OBAMA'S pronouncement on stem cell research last week, as we noted at the time, was only a partial decision. He decreed that federal funding of such research could go forward on a much broader scale than President George W. Bush had permitted. But he didn't say whether it could proceed on stem cells derived from embryos created specifically for the purpose of research. This is in large part an ethical question. Mr. Obama is right to turn to scientists for advice on the matter, but he should not hide behind them in making the ultimate decision.

Embryonic stem cell research is thought to hold great promise for the treatment of Parkinson's and other debilitating diseases and conditions. But many Americans are troubled by the destruction of human embryos that such research requires. As a result, Mr. Bush limited federal funding to research on stem cell lines in existence at the time of his 2001 decision; there would be no incentive for further creation or destruction of embryos for experimentation.

A breakthrough came in 2007: Scientists learned to develop stem cells from adult skin cells. Some argued that this would end the need to use embryos. Others, though, said that the field was too young to close off any avenue, and that the embryonic lines available under Mr. Bush's order had proved too limiting.

Mr. Obama accepted the latter argument, and we supported him. In so doing, though, he shunned a possible compromise: to allow research on stem cell lines grown from embryos that were created in fertility laboratories but never implanted. Thousands are frozen and awaiting destruction; with permission of the egg and sperm donors, they might satisfy researchers' needs. Mr. Obama did not embrace this opportunity to reach out to opponents -- not all of whom, of course, would have been satisfied by such a compromise.

The president has asked the National Institutes of Health to develop guidelines for research. Scientists can develop rules to make sure donors are dealt with ethically. If the scientists so believe, they can present reasons why existing frozen embryos aren't enough -- why research would benefit from having embryos created. But it's not the job of the scientist to decide whether those reasons outweigh concerns about such a practice. That's the president's job. He should listen to the scientists' arguments, make his decision and -- as Mr. Bush did in 2001 -- explain it to the American people.

In the WaPo: "Obama's New Tack: Blaming Bush"

Obama's New Tack: Blaming Bush. By Scott Wilson
President Points to 'Inherited' Economy
Washington Post, Saturday, March 14, 2009; A01

In his inaugural address, President Obama proclaimed "an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics."

It hasn't taken long for the recriminations to return -- or for the Obama administration to begin talking about the unwelcome "inheritance" of its predecessor.

Over the past month, Obama has reminded the public at every turn that he is facing problems "inherited" from the Bush administration, using increasingly bracing language to describe the challenges his administration is up against. The "deepening economic crisis" that the president described six days after taking office became "a big mess" in remarks this month to graduating police cadets in Columbus, Ohio.

"By any measure," he said during a March 4 event calling for government-contracting reform, "my administration has inherited a fiscal disaster."

Obama's more frequent and acid reminders that former president George W. Bush left behind a trillion-dollar budget deficit, a 14-month recession and a broken financial system have come at the same time Republicans have ramped up criticism that the current president's policies are compounding the nation's economic problems.

Obama had initially been content to leave partisan defense strategy to his proxies, but as the fiscal picture has continued to darken, he has appeared more willing to risk his image as a politician who is above petty partisanship to personally remind the public of Bush's legacy.

His approval ratings remain strong -- above 60 percent, according to the most recent Gallup poll -- but have dropped from their highs almost entirely because of falling support among Republicans since he took office.

Upon entering the White House in 2001, Bush pinned the lackluster economy on his predecessor, using the "Clinton recession" to successfully argue in favor of tax cuts that won some Democratic support. But for Obama, who built his candidacy on a promise to rise above Washington's divisive partisan traditions -- winning over many independent voters and moderate Republicans in the process -- blaming his predecessor holds special risks.

He will need support beyond his Democratic base as he begins lobbying for his $3.6 trillion budget, which proposes sweeping changes in health care, the energy sector and the public education system. The president did not receive a single House Republican vote for his stimulus plan, prompting some in his administration to view his bipartisan outreach efforts as having little hope of success.

And Republicans have seemed only more emboldened in their rhetoric. Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), for example, recently called the borrowing needed to fund the president's economic recovery plans "generational theft."

"What the administration is involved in now is the politics of attribution," said Lawrence R. Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota. "Each week that goes by with falling job numbers and Republican criticism of the administration's flaws means falling approval ratings. What's the antidote? That the guilty party is George Bush."

"The trick," Jacobs said, "is how do you shift blame to George Bush and retain any credibility on the idea that you are looking past partisan warfare? This looks like a doubling down on a very partisan approach."

Rahm Emanuel, Obama's chief of staff, denied that the president has changed his tone toward the previous administration. He said Obama is "not trying to place blame, but he is trying to say clearly: Here's what we've got and here's our way out of it. He's offered a positive alternative to their criticism."

"The truth is that 98 percent of his speeches are about the future, and 2 percent are about inheritance," Emanuel said. "Whereas I think for Republicans it's 2 percent about the future, and 98 percent hope that the people have amnesia."

Until recently, the job of reminding the country of the Bush-era legacy had been left mostly to senior administration officials, and it sometimes ranged beyond economic matters. Referring to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Vice President Biden said soon after the inauguration that "we're trying to figure out exactly what we've inherited here."

In early February, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that "after I accepted the position, I began looking at the broad array of problems that we were going to inherit," citing the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan in particular.

But most of the Bush-era blame has focused on the economy and the dismal state of the government's finances. Bush's spokesman, Rob Saliterman, declined to comment for this article.
Obama has strengthened his rhetoric gradually. Thomas E. Mann, a senior fellow at the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution, said the administration's "sharpened language is a response to the Republican argument against Obama based on huge deficits and big spending."
Six days after taking office, Obama kicked off an event on jobs, energy reform and climate change with "a few words about the deepening economic crisis that we've inherited." He lamented announced job cuts at such economic mainstays as Microsoft, Intel, Home Depot and Caterpillar, among others.

Just over a week later, Obama, arguing for his stimulus plan, said that "we've inherited a terrible mess," and a few days after that, in the economically depressed city of Elkhart, Ind., he told the audience, "We've inherited an economic crisis as deep and dire as any since the Great Depression."

During a prime-time news conference later that day, he used "inherited" twice in the same sentence to describe the deficit and "the most profound economic emergency since the Great Depression."

This month, Obama has described inheriting "a fiscal disaster" and "a real mess," as administration officials emphasized that the effects of the stimulus package have yet to be seen in paychecks and job-creating public-works projects.

"There's a fascinating behind-the-scenes trend taking place for someone who remains a very popular president," said Ari Fleischer, a former Bush press secretary, describing the decline in Obama's approval ratings and an increase in disapproval numbers. "His response to that trend is to turn up the blame on George Bush and everything that came before him. And he was the one who talked about getting past partisanship."

The economy continues to shed jobs -- 651,000 in February alone -- and the Dow Jones index is roughly 12 percent lower than when the market opened on the day of Obama's inauguration. Perhaps most damaging has been the uncertainty surrounding Obama's strategy to rescue the banking sector, a plan that has been criticized for lacking detail.

Host Chris Wallace asked on "Fox News Sunday" this month, "Can this now fairly be called the Obama bear market?"

House Republican Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) said, "I want to take the president at his word that he wants to work on these problems plaguing American families," adding that "people are looking for leadership."

"It is the Obama economy and the Obama stock market," Cantor said. "This is about today, and he's assumed his post."

Researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report.

President Obama promises to rein in earmarks. Soon.

He'll Quit Tomorrow. WaPo Editorial
President Obama promises to rein in earmarks. Soon.
WaPo, Friday, March 13, 2009; A16

LIKE A DIETER who allows himself just one more slice of cake before starting to count calories, President Obama signed the $410 billion omnibus spending bill, then pledged to get tough on congressional earmark spending -- next time. "This piece of legislation must mark an end to the old way of doing business," Mr. Obama announced. As with the dieter, skepticism is appropriate. The old way was supposed to have ended already. After all, Mr. Obama, in his inaugural address, proclaimed that "those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account, to spend wisely, reform bad habits."

The political demands of the moment led Mr. Obama to sign this measure despite its imperfections. That's understandable, but the same pressures will arise next time, too, as members of Congress will be well aware as they consider whether to take the president on over earmarks. Tradeoffs come with the territory, but Mr. Obama is accepting them after holding himself out as -- indeed, while continuing to hold himself out as -- the avatar of a new way of doing business. "Barack Obama is committed to returning earmarks to less than $7.8 billion a year, the level they were at before 1994, when Republicans took control of Congress and the level of earmarks began rising dramatically," the Obama campaign proclaimed. "I've pledged to slash earmarks by more than half when I am president of the United States," Mr. Obama said in September. Somehow, that commitment was missing from Wednesday's announcement of future restraint. The dieter didn't set a weight-loss goal.

Earmarks account for only a sliver of spending, and the Constitution does give Congress the power of the purse. As Mr. Obama said Wednesday, "Done right, earmarks give legislators the opportunity to direct federal money to worthy projects that benefit people in their district." Moreover, some ugly excesses associated with them have already been curtailed. The amount of earmarked funds has been brought down in the past three years, and disclosure has improved. Mr. Obama's after-the-omnibus-has-left-the-barn proposals would expand on these changes by requiring lawmakers to identify not only the earmarks they receive but the ones they request. Earmarks for private, for-profit companies would be subject to competitive bidding.

But earmarks are symbols of broader indiscipline, and they also are conducive to corruption. So it was disappointing that Mr. Obama shied away from a tougher stance even as he congratulated himself for doing more. He called earmarks for private companies "the single most corrupting element of this practice." Why, then, not do away with such earmarks entirely? As a senator, Mr. Obama eventually renounced private-sector earmarks. Likewise, Mr. Obama said that he would work to strip out unjustified earmarks from future bills -- but he proposed no mechanism for giving him that authority. "He looks forward to working through a process that allows that to happen," press secretary Robert Gibbs said. So do we.

Conservative views on BHO's embryonic stem cell policy and scientific integrity

Obama's 'Science' Fiction. By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, March 13, 2009; Page A17

Last week, the White House invited me to a signing ceremony overturning the Bush (43) executive order on stem cell research. I assume this was because I have long argued in these columns and during my five years on the President's Council on Bioethics that, contrary to the Bush policy, federal funding should be extended to research on embryonic stem cell lines derived from discarded embryos in fertility clinics.

I declined to attend. Once you show your face at these things you become a tacit endorser of whatever they spring. My caution was vindicated.

President Bush had restricted federal funding for embryonic stem cell research to cells derived from embryos that had already been destroyed (as of his speech of Aug. 9, 2001). While I favor moving that moral line to additionally permit the use of spare fertility clinic embryos, President Obama replaced it with no line at all. He pointedly left open the creation of cloned -- and noncloned sperm-and-egg-derived -- human embryos solely for the purpose of dismemberment and use for parts.

I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix. Moreover, given the protean power of embryonic manipulation, the temptation it presents to science and the well-recorded human propensity for evil even in the pursuit of good, lines must be drawn. I suggested the bright line prohibiting the deliberate creation of human embryos solely for the instrumental purpose of research -- a clear violation of the categorical imperative not to make a human life (even if only a potential human life) a means rather than an end.

On this, Obama has nothing to say. He leaves it entirely to the scientists. This is more than moral abdication. It is acquiescence to the mystique of "science" and its inherent moral benevolence. How anyone as sophisticated as Obama can believe this within living memory of Mengele and Tuskegee and the fake (and coercive) South Korean stem cell research is hard to fathom.

That part of the ceremony, watched from the safe distance of my office, made me uneasy. The other part -- the ostentatious issuance of a memorandum on "restoring scientific integrity to government decision-making" -- would have made me walk out.

Restoring? The implication, of course, is that while Obama is guided solely by science, Bush was driven by dogma, ideology and politics.

What an outrage. Bush's nationally televised stem cell speech was the most morally serious address on medical ethics ever given by an American president. It was so scrupulous in presenting the best case for both his view and the contrary view that until the last few minutes, the listener had no idea where Bush would come out.

Obama's address was morally unserious in the extreme. It was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a forest of straw men. Such as his admonition that we must resist the "false choice between sound science and moral values." Yet, exactly 2 minutes and 12 seconds later he went on to declare that he would never open the door to the "use of cloning for human reproduction."

Does he not think that a cloned human would be of extraordinary scientific interest? And yet he banned it.

Is he so obtuse as not to see that he had just made a choice of ethics over science? Yet, unlike Bush, who painstakingly explained the balance of ethical and scientific goods he was trying to achieve, Obama did not even pretend to make the case why some practices are morally permissible and others not.

This is not just intellectual laziness. It is the moral arrogance of a man who continuously dismisses his critics as ideological while he is guided exclusively by pragmatism (in economics, social policy, foreign policy) and science in medical ethics.

Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible. Obama's pretense that he will "restore science to its rightful place" and make science, not ideology, dispositive in moral debates is yet more rhetorical sleight of hand -- this time to abdicate decision-making and color his own ideological preferences as authentically "scientific."

Dr. James Thomson, the pioneer of embryonic stem cells, said "if human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough." Obama clearly has not.

Review of Wayne Kramer's "Crossing Over"

'Crossing': Over the Top. By Ann Hornaday
Message Movie Is Tripped by Its Excesses -- and Earnestness
WaPo, March 13, 2009

"Crossing Over" is the kind of movie that gives Hollywood liberalism not a bad name, nor a good name, but an irritating, self-righteous and ultimately fatuous name.

The multilinear story involving illegal immigrants clearly takes its structural cue from such similarly tangled roundelays as "Crash" and "Babel." But the cinematic comparisons don't end there. As "Crossing Over" makes its patronizing points, by way of two-dimensional characters and billboarded plot points, it recalls other, better movies that dealt with the same subjects far more deftly. This will come as a particular surprise to fans of director Wayne Kramer's Las Vegas thriller "The Cooler," which was one of the most understated and subtle surprises of 2003.

Harrison Ford does his level, gruffly sardonic best playing Max Brogan, a Los Angeles Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent under whose scarred exterior beats a bleeding heart of gold. ("This man is having a [expletive] heart attack!" he bellows on behalf of one of his charges at one point. "I want him seen to!") When he arrests an illegal garment worker, she begs him to take care of her young son, an encounter that sends him on a journey of -- what else? -- personal redemption.

Ray Liotta, Ashley Judd and Jim Sturgess also appear, as an immigration official, a lawyer and a musician on the prowl for a green card, respectively. In supporting roles, the terrific New Zealand-born actor Cliff Curtis plays Brogan's fiery Iranian American partner; Summer Bishil ("Towelhead") portrays a 15-year-old Muslim girl whose naivete leads to preposterous ends; and Alice Eve, who looks like a digitally morphed combination of Naomi Watts and Nicole Kidman, plays an actress who wants to be the next Naomi Watts or Nicole Kidman.

But wait, there's more! We haven't even gotten to the Korean kid being tempted by gangbangers. Indeed, there's always more in "Crossing Over," whose characters, story lines, plot twists and polemical talking points are way too numerous -- and tiresome, and predictable -- to mention. Through it all, Ford and Judd manage best to overcome the script, with Ford retaining his craggy dignity and Judd ever-radiant despite dialogue so stilted you can hear the keystrokes behind every word.

It takes a particular kind of warped skill to make a movie that's simultaneously didactic and exploitative, but Kramer manages to thread just that unfortunate needle, alternating windy speeches about the American dream with lurid scenes of sex and violence.

The themes of tradition, assimilation, post-9/11 paranoia, random acts of bureaucratic injustice and intercultural tension have been adroitly portrayed in such recent releases as "Under the Same Moon," "Persepolis," "The Visitor" and "Gran Torino," to name just a few. Each of those films tapped into the timeless, universal themes Kramer seems unable to wrap his arms around. Maybe if he had kept "Crossing Over" simpler, he would have made a less simplistic movie.

President Obama and signing statements

Congrats, President Obama. By Ed Whelan
Bench Memos/NRO, Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Candidate Obama made it clear on the campaign trail that he rejected the ABA’s risible conclusion that a president may not properly use signing statements to state his constitutional objections to provisions in laws that he is signing:

“No one doubts that it is appropriate to use signing statements to protect a president's constitutional prerogatives.”

Well, no one other than the members of the ABA’s task force that produced its ridiculous report. (For various of my criticisms of the ABA’s report, see here, here, here, and here.)

Given that the ABA is pigheadedly sticking to its position, I’m glad to see this report that President Obama, in signing the omnibus spending bill today, “released a ‘signing statement’ in which he said several of the bill’s provisions raised constitutional concerns.” (As for the omnibus bill itself, I doubt very much that it is to be welcomed.)

Obama calls himself a New Democrat, and shows what it means

Yes He Is. By Bruce Reed
Obama calls himself a New Democrat, and shows what it means.
Slate, Wednesday, March 11, 2009, at 3:06 PM ET

For conservatives still trying to fit Barack Obama into their old tax-and-spend-liberal box, Tuesday was a very bad day. In the morning, the president gave a tough-minded education reform speech demanding more accountability from schools, teachers, students, and parents. The same afternoon, he brought members of the House New Democrat Coalition to the White House, and told them, "I am a New Democrat." According to Politico, Obama went on to describe himself as a fiscally responsible, pro-growth Democrat who supports free and fair trade and opposes protectionism.

So much for the ridiculous talk-radio bid to dub Obama a socialist. As Ruth Marcus points out in today's Washington Post, "The notion that President Obama has lurched to the left since his inauguration and is governing as an unreconstructed liberal is bunk." From his education reform agenda to his team of pragmatists to his heavy emphasis on responsibility, Obama is leading the country the way he promised he would: neither to the left nor right, but on a path that's new and different.

Full disclosure: I've always loved the term "New Democrat," and in the early '90s launched a magazine by that name for the Democratic Leadership Council, the organization I now head. The label and the philosophy behind it were an attempt to think anew and move past the ideological logjams of that era.

But that was then, and this is now. The job of my group and other progressive, reform-minded organizations isn't to label Barack Obama or hold him to some old standard – it's to help him enact his reform agenda and succeed at the standard he has set for himself. The challenges of 2009 are different from the challenges of 1992, and what it means to be a New Democrat now cannot be the same as what it meant back then.

Obama has always steered clear of labels, with good reason. One of the great hopes of his campaign and his presidency is the prospect of a new, post-partisan politics that leaves behind old debates and moves beyond old boundaries. That approach has become all the more necessary in the midst of an economic crisis that demands new answers and eschews rigid ideology in favor of doing what works.

The president is right that old labels don't mean anything, but new labels do – and in Obama's capable hands, the term "New Democrat" can take on new meaning. As Obama and others have observed, the traditional terms of the ideological debate – liberal and progressive, moderate and centrist, conservative and right-wing – are stale and imprecise. Obama has the opportunity to define a governing philosophy for our time on his own terms.

In his campaign and as president, Obama has put forth the core of his new philosophy for a new time. In January, he described it as "a grand bargain." "Our challenge is going to be identifying what works and putting more money into that, eliminating things that don't work, and making things that we have more efficient," he said. "Everybody's going to have to give. Everybody's going to have to have some skin in the game."

Obama's inaugural address, his joint address to Congress, and his budget all have reinforced that philosophy. On Sunday, the Washington Post dedicated 1,600 words to the president's use of the word "responsibility" – another sign that the "new era of responsibility" Obama promised is here to stay.

Obama's impressive education speech yesterday provided further proof of his bold agenda for reform. The president explained why transforming education is central to America's economic future, and outlined several smart steps to make it happen. In the economic recovery bill, he secured $100 billion to invest in education. On Tuesday, he committed once again to make sure that investment brings real change. As Rahm Emanuel told the Post, "The resources come with a bow tied around them that says 'Reform.'"

Obama called for rewarding good teachers and making it easier to remove bad ones; challenged states to stop capping the number of charter schools; urged states to adopt rigorous common standards; and repeated his pledge to cut the dropout rate in high schools and college. He also reminded the nation that more resources and more accountability from schools, teachers, and students won't change our education system unless Americans take more responsibility as parents.

On education, Obama showed a path out of gridlock that could work as well in solving other entrenched problems. "For decades, Washington has been trapped in the same stale debates that have paralyzed progress and perpetuated our educational decline," he said Tuesday. "Too many supporters of my party have resisted the idea of rewarding excellence in teaching with extra pay, even though it can make a difference in the classroom. Too many in the Republican Party have opposed new investments in early education, despite compelling evidence of its importance."

The tectonic plates on which the 20th century was built are shifting in the 21st. In the 1930s, New Dealers like FDR had to save capitalism from itself. In the 1990s, New Democrats like Bill Clinton had to modernize progressive government. Over the next few years, Barack Obama has to do both at the same time. For that, as Obama made clear again yesterday, a new president with a new approach is exactly what we need.

Bruce Reed, who was President Clinton's domestic policy adviser, is president of the Democratic Leadership Council and editor-in-chief of Blueprint magazine. Read his disclosure here.

WaPo: President Obama lifts the limits on federally funded research but puts off key moral questions

Stem Cell Questions. WaPo Editorial
President Obama lifts the limits on federally funded research but puts off key moral questions.
WaPo, Tuesday, March 10, 2009; A12

PRESIDENT OBAMA did the right thing yesterday when he reversed President George W. Bush's limitations on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. The potential for cures and treatments of debilitating diseases with these versatile cells is enormous. But this type of experimentation is thick with ethical and moral questions, many of which Mr. Obama put off answering.

"We will develop strict guidelines, which we will rigorously enforce, because we cannot ever tolerate misuse or abuse," the president said yesterday at the White House. But he offered little indication of where he would draw those lines. In effect since August 2001, Mr. Bush's limits were offered as a compromise between the needs of scientists and the moral and ethical convictions of those troubled by the stem cell extraction process that destroys the embryos. Mr. Bush permitted federal funding of experimentation, but only on stem cell lines that existed at the time of his announcement. In practice, those 21 viable stem cell lines proved too few, and many scientists said the restrictions were holding back research. The breakthrough in 2007 that made human skin cells function like embryonic stem cells has great potential. But there are still questions about the efficacy of that approach. Mr. Obama says he wants all types of experimentation in this arena to be done "responsibly."

Mr. Obama will allow federal funding to be used for stem cell research on lines derived from embryos since 2001 and into the future. He has directed the National Institutes of Health to devise within 120 days the guidelines that will regulate how this research is conducted. But will research be performed only on stem cell lines grown from the thousands of frozen embryos in fertility clinics that have been slated for destruction? Mr. Obama didn't say. The 1995 legislation known as the Dickey-Wicker Amendment bans federal money from being used to create or destroy human embryos for research, but not research on stem cells from such embryos once they have been created.

Aside from saying, "As a person of faith, I believe we are called to care for each other and work to ease human suffering," the president has not given a hint as to where he stands on some thorny questions. Should Dickey-Wicker be repealed? He leaves it up to Congress to decide that. Where does he stand on growing human embryos for experimentation in general and using them for stem cells in particular? It's unclear.

The White House said that Mr. Obama doesn't want to prejudge the NIH guidelines but that this will not be the last we'll hear from Mr. Obama on this subject. We hope not. Some of these ethical questions need to be dealt with in the political arena, and not just by scientists.