Remarkable thoughts on the suicide of a young actor

From someone who made his way back from the brink. Read the whole thing, bookmark it, pass it around, maybe print it out and keep it. You never know when someone you know, or even someone you love, might need to read this "Prayer from the Living World."

The body of actor Andrew Koenig was found in Vancouver’s Stanley Park yesterday. His father, Walter Koenig, said that his son “took his own life, and was in a lot of pain.” Like most of my generation, I grew up with Walter Koenig as Chekhov on Star Trek, and he played a superb villain much later, on Babylon 5. Until his press conference yesterday, I didn’t realize he was a man of such incredible strength and dignity. He asked for his family to be left in peace to mourn their loss. I hope he won’t mind if I take this sad occasion to address others who might be following the road that ended in Stanley Park for Andrew. No matter how far you have gone down that road, there is always a path that leads away. I could offer no greater tribute to Andrew and his family than trying to help you take it, or at least see it.

You won’t find the beginning of that path in your house, or your room, or any other private place where you torment yourself, and wonder why a world you’re hiding from can no longer see you. You’ll have to step outside, and take a walk through your town. You’ll pass hospitals where the gift of life is unwrapped and presented to the universe. In another wing, life is held as precious treasure by families gathered around quiet beds, surrounded by tireless machines and their tired, but determined, keepers. Perhaps you’ll find a hospice, where the dying embrace their last opportunity to share their lives with all who receive the blessing of a seat beside them. You’ll pass churches and temples, filled with the sworn enemies of despair.

You may find yourself wishing you could give the unwanted years of your future to the clients of those hospitals and hospices. I did, years ago, when I stood where you are standing now. I was on my knees at the time, offering that trade with all my heart. It doesn’t work that way. Those who tend the hospices can tell you why, and the people in the churches and temples can explain why it shouldn’t. . . .

It gets better.

Why the Democrats must go forward ALONE on Health Care Reform

Jonathan Chait, of the usually-center-left journal The New Republic, has the highest praise for the star quality of President Obama:

President Obama is so much smarter and a better communicator than members of Congress in either party. The contrast, side by side, is almost ridiculous.

Not everyone agrees that President Obama was the single, standout performer at the recent health care "summit". The detail-oriented Tom Maguire lets some air out of Chait's balloon with some inconvenient facts like:

"Numerous Democrats in the room have explained why it's not possible to ban insurance companies from discriminating against those with preexisting conditions without also covering everybody and subsidizing those who afford it. (Short answer: people would just game the system, going without insurance until they get sick.)"

Wait a second! Mr. Chait may have forgotten, but back in the endless Democratic primaries we sat through debate after debate in which Obama argued that mandates were not necessary. And he won both the nomination and the election! Was Obama an idiot conservative back then, or a disingenuous liar? And whence sprang any sort of a public mandate for these new mandates?

Maguire gets an assist from James Taranto:

The Great Condescender

No one holds a candle to Barack Obama when it comes to making smart liberals feel superior.

Remember that car insurance story the President told at the "Summit"? Maguire finds in that story the rationale for the Democrats' belief that they need to take over health care decisions from Americans:

So what does this anecdote from the Great Communicator tells us? Well, it might tell us he is as dumb as a bag of rocks for not understanding the difference between liability and collision insurance.

But let's give him the benefit if the doubt! I am trying to think like a Lib here, so bear with me - the moral of the story seems to be that even Barack Obama, future editor of the Harvard Law Review and President of the United States, found simple insurance decisions utterly mystifying and had no idea what he had actually purchased. . . .

Furthermore, despite his utter confusion Obama apparently blundered to the common (and thriftier) conclusion, since no one buys collision on a junker.

However, months later he realized that paying more for collision would have been a great idea, so history is re-written. It is now due to ACME's rapaciousness that they are unwilling to right this wrong and write him a check. And they laughed! . . . After the laughter died they should have explained to the college grad that he could file a third-party claim against the other driver, assuming Obama was not at fault, but that also may have been too confusing.

Well. If even Obama can be duped by greedy insurers into saving his money and taking a sensible risk, what hope do the rest of us have? Surely we need these new health insurance mandates to make sure both that we buy policies and that the policies we buy have everything we need, not just everything we (stupidly think we) want.

This is classic, generic Democratic paternalism - people can't be trusted to make their own decisions and they certainly should not be expected to endure the consequences of those decisions.

Young Barack should never have been allowed to buy liability-only insurance that didn't cover damage to his junker. Barack, Nancy and Harry will protect us from our own deplorable decision making on the health care front.

Video here, plus from the comment thread:

this is what happens when entitlement meets ignorance. . .

The fact that he compares health insurance to "compulsory" auto insurance is another joke. Every state I have lived in requires proof of financial responsibility, not insurance. You are not REQUIRED to buy insurance, you could instead post a bond. Why? It's probably not legal to require the purchase of a product or service, even for a privilege. . . .

Of course, the whole idea of the Democratic plan is to force you to purchase (either directly or indirectly, through reduced wages so your employer can pay for them) expensive, bloated-up policies from the same insurance companies the Democrats have been demonizing, so that you will come to hate those companies and turn for relief to a single-payer health care system. Then the rationing and Canadian-style delays will begin in ernest. Because it's the only "fair" way. No more "It's my health, it's my choice" for either Americans or lucky Canadians.

The Democrats' intentions are so good, and for the Left, good intentions are all-important. Their vastly increased power by way of controlling medical care for all Americans is just a fortunate side-benefit for the party of Big Government. Andy McCarty:

Today's Democrats are controlled by the radical Left, and it is more important to them to execute the permanent transformation of American society than it is to win the upcoming election cycles. They have already factored in losing in November — even losing big. For them, winning big now outweighs that. I think they're right.

I hear Republicans getting giddy over the fact that "reconciliation," if it comes to that, is a huge political loser. That's the wrong way to look at it. The Democratic leadership has already internalized the inevitablility of taking its political lumps. That makes reconciliation truly scary. Since the Dems know they will have to ram this monstrosity through, they figure it might as well be as monstrous as they can get wavering Democrats to go along with. Clipping the leadership's statist ambitions in order to peel off a few Republicans is not going to work. I'm glad Republicans have held firm, but let's not be under any illusions about what that means. In the Democrat leadership, we are not dealing with conventional politicians for whom the goal of being reelected is paramount and will rein in their radicalism. They want socialized medicine and all it entails about government control even more than they want to win elections. After all, if the party of government transforms the relationship between the citizen and the state, its power over our lives will be vast even in those cycles when it is not in the majority. This is about power, and there is more to power than winning elections, especially if you've calculated that your opposition does not have the gumption to dismantle your ballooning welfare state.

This is the only explanation of their "suicidal" push to pass this horrible bill that makes sense to me. Lots of government appointments waiting for Blue Dogs who lose elections in November.

Why don't Canadian banks fail like American ones?

Interesting article. And here I thought Canada was supposed to be a bastion of oppressive, progressive "compassion." Which it now is on many social issues. But it seems Canadians are pretty hard-nosed and banker-friendly when it comes to mortages. Perhaps their success during the Great Depression taught them something: No mortgage tax deductions, no loans to poor credit risks required by the government in order to keep your "good guy" rating, mortgage insurance coupled with realistic assessments of the value of properties, etc. And foreclosure doesn't get the homeowner off the hook financially. Cruel. Heartless. At least it seems that way until a major world financial crisis comes. Then these same old-fashioned, boring, understandable, conservative, cruel, unfair, elitist policies seem benevolent. And the progressive "compassionate" mortgage regulations in the United States start to seem cruel. What good are "compassionate" regulations which become cruel in hard times?

The conservative pro-banking approach in Canada has led to higher rates of home ownership, more stable home prices, more home equity among borrowers and far lower rates of foreclosure than in the United States. It's sort of like a paradox. But not really. Because the Canadian system is apparently still pretty much based on financial honesty and realism. It's not based on people getting special deals from banks via their favorite politicians and bureaucrats. And it's apparently not based on certain favored financial institutions getting government subsidies or special, fancy arrangements approved to compensate for the extra "compassionate" risks encouraged or required by government policies.

What's coming for the world economy?

Troubling theories by two economists concerning a possible final financial bubble, followed by a collapse of the world economy. "Protective" regulations and government currency manipulations may be dangerous in the long run:

Through direct subsidies (such as deposit insurance) and indirect support (such as central bank bailouts), we encourage our banking system to ignore large, socially harmful ‘tail risks’ – those risks where there is a small chance of calamitous collapse. As far as banks are concerned, they can walk away and let the state clean it up. Some bankers and policymakers even do well during the collapse that they helped to create.

Each time the system runs into problems, the Federal Reserve quickly lowers interest rates to revive it. These crises appear to be getting worse and worse – and their impact is increasingly global. Not only are interest rates near zero around the world, but many countries are on fiscal trajectories that require major changes to avoid eventual financial collapse.

"The only way to prevent a catastrophe, according to Johnson and Boone, is to cut deficits back and reform the financial system to avoid future hanky-panky. But neither is very optimistic it can be done. The actors benefiting from the short term bubbles are simply too powerful to keep anyone from wresting control of the wheel. And if the reformers ever succeed the money men will simply corrupt them all over again."

Now financial companies can operate on the basis that they are “too big to fail”, in other words too important not to be saved.

Read the whole thing for some interesting information on the connections between Wall Street (especially Goldman Sachs) and the Obama campaign, the potential for serious trouble in Greece and Spain, and implications for the future of "healthcare reform" in the U.S.

What happens when "compassionate" policies backfire?
Well, not to worry. The Country's in the Very Best of Hands.

Even Today.

Oops, the President let Republicans speak about healthcare

Well, things did not turn out as bad for Republicans at the Health Care Summit as a lot of people thought they would. Jennifer Rubin:

Obama then essentially failed to pin the blame on the Republicans, who generally seemed a bit more reasonable and genial than Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and company. (Political Rule No. 1: Get inept opponents.) As Gerson sums up: “The whole exercise, in short, was an ambush. But the quarry, it seems, got away.”

Jay Nordlinger:

Let me try something out on you: This health-care summit was a bad idea for the Democrats for this reason: They have long benefited from a perception — a perception greatly abetted by the media: The Republicans don’t care about health care, they don’t know about health care, they are the Party of No. All the ideas and caring are on the Democratic side.

It is not so, and it has never been so. And now everybody knows it.

Republicans were well-prepared (in contrast to the "question time" after the State of the Union when President Obama made a surprise challenge to televise the "conversation"). Best Video here.

Democrats are always taking a risk when they let Republicans speak directly to the public, unfiltered by the media. Obama and the Republicans seemed reasonable. Like last year had never happened. But appearances can be deceiving.

For the Health Care Summit, President Obama set the agenda, set the terms for the exchange, spoke longer than anyone else, and he had posted his bill on line just a few hours before the summit, so Republicans would not have much time to prepare. But he still acted irritated when Republicans said things he didn't like. Though he seemed competent (well, most of the time), people are noticing another side to him, more and more. And many people found the summit to be boring. Partisan posturing continues.

Bottom line: Obama doubles down on health care reform. Bipartisanship DOES mean surrender to him, or something pretty close to surrender.

I think Tunku Varadarajan captured the essence of the summit best. Follow the link, read the whole thing, then see if you agree with his wish. I'm not sure I do:

What became clear in the long hours through which the summit meandered was that Obama was the best Democrat on display. . .

The meeting wound down forlornly, with Obama attempting to enumerate issues that the two sides had in common. But there could be no escape from the one, fundamental difference that divides the two sides: The Democrats want this bill and the Republicans don’t. That—and the latter’s preference for market solutions and the former’s rejection of them—ensured that the summit was a total waste of our time and Obama's.

After this six-and-a-half-hour civics lesson, let us now return to the Leninist mode: that of crushing the opposition. I'm not keen on health-care reform, but I do wish that Obama and his friends had hammered the thing through in its full, robust, vital form, with all the "radical" logic built in. They had the political momentum and mandate and yet got stuck—as they got stuck today—tossing out or diluting all the elements that had made it the (supposedly) progressive thing it was. I so much prefer it when the winning side does what it likes, unapologetically. There’s honesty in that, and dignity. And the other side respects you more, too.

On the other hand, if the Democrats are going to be theatical, maybe they should prepare a little better to be theatrical.

Finally, The President's Own Health Care Plan

Up until now, the President has let his filibuster-proof Democratic Congress take the lead, and the heat, in meeting his goals for reforming health care financing and provision. I can't think of anyone who is happy about the current controversy over health care reform, though I know a lot of people who are glad that the previous Democratic plans did not pass. Roger Kimball picks up excerpts from several pieces concerning the President's own health care plan. I've highlighted some phrases and added a some links below:

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal carried a blistering editorial [1] about President Obama’s 11-page effort to combine elements of the House and Senate bills to “reform” — read, reduce to a government-run satrapy — American health care. Entitled “ObamaCare at Ramming Speed,” the editorial cites chapter and verse to show how the “the President’s plan” “manages to take the worst of both the House and Senate bills and combine them into something more destructive. It includes more taxes, more subsidies and even less cost control than the Senate bill. And it purports to fix the special-interest favors in the Senate bill not by eliminating them—but by expanding them to everyone.”

Not for the first time since January 20, 2009, I found myself thinking of Governor Mitch Daniels’s characterization of the Obama administration’s “shock-and-awe statism.” . . .

Even as the Obama administration shows itself racing to revolutionize one aspect of American society after the next, so it demonstrates once again that socialism is only another name for paternalism, which, with Tocqueville, we may file under the heading of “Democratic Despotism.” Remember Obama’s promise in October of 2008 that he was on the threshold of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America”? Here we go. You don’t “fundamentally transform” a capitalist country that puts a premium on entrepreneurship and individual liberty without undermining capitalism, innovation, and freedom.

Hence no one should be surprised at the aroma of coercion that is such a prominent feature of Obama’s various proposals to remake this country. . . .

Tomorrow, we can all watch the little circus Obama has crafted for the credulous: the “bipartisan” “debate” over health care in which Obama, as master of ceremonies, will invite his Republican colleagues to demonstrate their “bi-partisanship” by acquiescing to the Democratic plan. The show is guaranteed to be a travesty, though not, I think, in the entertaining, theatrical sense. . . . .

Read the whole thing. Follow his links (and mine, if you like).

From the comments, "Valerie Jarrett is offput that her brilliant President could be obstructed by other branches of gov’t (not to mention we the ignoramuses) in attempting to get his brilliant plans for America enacted." "Val should stand your hair on end." Watch the benevolently slanderous anti-Tea Party video clip at the link, with Ms. Jarrett's response to a man who thinks that people are rejecting the Democratic plans for health care reform because these plans sort of like some new technology that people fear (listen clear to the end of this uncomfortable piece) because they just don't understand. Ha!. Ms. Jarrett agrees that he has come up with a good analogy, noting that "Hope and Change" was successful during the presidential campaign because it was a phrase everyone could understand (though it apparently meant very different things to different people, leading to big disappointments now on both the Left and Right).

If only President Obama could find a simple phrase like that which would capture the complexities of the Democrats' massive health care bills, and reassure those extremist totally anti-government Tea Party protesters that they shouldn't worry their little heads about differences between the promises made concerning the bills and what is actually in the bills! The administration needs a "hope and change" type phrase which would put the peoples' minds at ease and make them realize that it wasn't really necessary for legislators to read the legislation before voting in it, and that the "reconciliation" process will fix anything that is wrong with any bill which gets passed.

Concerning "delivering health care reform, Ms. Jarrett says:"

. . . if the President could do it unilaterally, he would have done it a long time ago, I can assure you of that.

I was also impressed by Ms. Jarrett's comment concerning the special "burden" which President Obama carries "because he is so bright." Whew. The members of this administration REALLY DO think they know what's best for the 300 million or so people in the United States. They also seem to be far more impressed by intelligence than by experience, perceptiveness, consistency, responsiveness or any number of other qualities we generally look for in a leader. Which may be one reason why their approval numbers are tanking.

But you can't say they don't understand the power of the bully pulpit. President Obama is a highly political person. Acquaintances note that he is very competitive.

By the way, hasn't the President been touting a "pay as you go" theme for government in the past few weeks?:

"Obama's plan in two words: Balloon Mortgage."

And 2014 will be here before you know it.

George Washington's Birthday, 2010

Some interesting insights into the character of George Washington:

Today is the anniversary of the birth of George Washington. Of all the great men of the revolutionary era to whom we owe our freedom, Washington's greatness was the rarest and the most needed. At this remove in time, it is also the hardest to comprehend.

Take, for example, Washington's contribution to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Washington's mere presence lent the undertaking and its handiwork the legitimacy that resulted in success. The convention's first order of business was the election of a presiding officer. Washington was the delegates' unanimous choice.

Presiding over the convention during that fateful summer, Washington said virtually nothing. In his wonderful book on Washington, Richard Brookhiser notes: "The esteem in which Washington was held affected his fellow delegates first of all...Washington did not wield the power he possessed by speaking. . .

Read the whole thing. Try to imagine an individual like that in politics today.

So, what's the deal with this "Tea Party" movement?

Glenn Reynolds - read the whole thing.

There were promises of transparency and of a new kind of collaborative politics where establishment figures listened to ordinary Americans. We were going to see net spending cuts, tax cuts for nearly all Americans, an end to earmarks, legislation posted online for the public to review before it is signed into law, and a line-by-line review of the federal budget to remove wasteful programs.

These weren't the tea-party platforms I heard discussed in Nashville last weekend. They were the campaign promises of Barack Obama in 2008.

Mr. Obama made those promises because the ideas they represented were popular with average Americans. So popular, it turns out, that average Americans are organizing themselves in pursuit of the kind of good government Mr. Obama promised, but has not delivered. And that, in a nutshell, was the feel of the National Tea Party Convention. The political elites have failed, and citizens are stepping in to pick up the slack. . . .

Pundits claim the tea partiers are angry—and they are—but the most striking thing about the atmosphere in Nashville was how cheerful everyone seemed to be. I spoke with dozens of people, and the responses were surprisingly similar. Hardly any had ever been involved in politics before. Having gotten started, they were finding it to be not just worthwhile, but actually fun. Laughter rang out frequently, and when ne w-media mogul Andrew Breitbart held forth on a TV interview, a crowd gathered and broke into spontaneous applause.

A year ago, many told me, they were depressed about the future of America. Watching television pundits talk about President Obama's transformative plans for big government, they felt alone, isolated and helpless. That changed when protests, organized by bloggers, met Mr. Obama a year ago in Denver, Colo., Mesa, Ariz., and Seattle, Wash. Then came CNBC talker Rick Santelli's famous on-air rant on Feb. 19, 2009, which gave the tea-party movement its name.

Tea partiers are still angry at federal deficits, at Washington's habit of rewarding failure with handouts and punishing success with taxes and regulation, and the general incompetence that has marked the first year of the Obama presidency. But they're no longer depressed. . . .

If 2009 was the year of taking it to the streets, 2010 is the year of taking it to the polls. With ordinary Americans setting out to reclaim the political process, it's likely to be a bumpy ride for incumbents of both parties. I suspect the Founding Fathers would approve. emphasis mine.

Lincoln's birthday: An Impressive Fellow

Thoughts here and at the links.

Growth of Government, Death of Civil Society

This is how the expansion of government happens. The government takes over something (and civil society retreats) and soon people do not even know that it was ever done voluntarily. And, too often, the people who used to undertake the activity welcome the advance of government - "now we will not have to go begging for money" they tell themselves, not understanding that where there is government finance there is also government control. . . . .

VDH: Why Fear Big Government?

Victor Davis Hanson gives five non-standard reasons to fear big government. Read the whole thing. He's been around. He's studied the rise and fall of civilizations. He's worked in both the public and private sectors. Highlights:

1) Juvenal’s “Who will police the police?”

One of the scariest things about government is its exemption from laws by virtue of its monopoly on lawmaking and enforcement. I see this every day, from the mundane to the profound. 

with examples.

2) The Power of Envy
VDH includes several examples of bureaucratic "arrogance of office" which could have been motivated by envy.

I am all for codes, building inspectors, and plant regulators, but an excess of such investigators quickly creates a priestly class who take their own frustrations out on supposedly better off others.

Side note: The $250,000 income level which Obama characterizes as representing undeserving rich people who owe more to the government just happens to be slightly above the income level of most of the salaried liberal elite. Interestingly, incomes between $150,000 and $250,000 (representing this elite class) were exempted from additional Social Security taxes under Obama's scheme. So people are to pay Social Security taxes on incomes from $100 to $150,000 plus redistributionist payments on any income above $250,000. His core constituency, the "deserving almost-rich", were not characterized as owing more to America. An his mulit-billionaire supporters were assigned no higher income tax bracket than someone working 70 hours a week to pull in $250,000 (and the ultra-rich have enhanced access to tax shelters). Obama knows how to play up economic envy without drawing negative attention to his most avid supporters.

3) Patronage

In California there are hundreds of worthless state boards with six-figure, governor-appointed officials. We assume that in our term-limited state, these sinecures are the refuges of former state assembly and senate politicians. . . .

4) The Greek four-step
VDH gives four steps involved in the current socialistic decline in Greece:

I once lived in Greece for over two years, and visit there every other summer. Any casual observer could have predicted its present fiscal meltdown, which is emblematic of big government socialism. Here is the creed of many of the EU socialist states. . .

He then outlines the results, such as:

Repressed anger is the national creed: those who work the hardest and pay the most for others less industrious or gifted barely constrain a seething resentment; those on the receiving end constantly channel envy and jealousy as mechanisms to justify why “they” should redistribute income to themselves, the more deserving.

Update: Greek debt and Goldman Sachs.
Second link: Should the EU jettison Greece? Should the U.S. jettison California?

"Every piece of evidence screams against pouring any more money down this hole.” . . . Some reckoning like this was bound to happen in the changeover to the common currency. That's why the founding documents of the EU put so much emphasis on quality public finances and curtailing support for profligate governments. A Greek default would not endanger the euro any more than a California default will endanger the dollar.

5) Ministry of Truth

Orwell was on to something in his focus on the government’s power of language to manufacture truth out of fantasy.

RELATED:
Ben Stein on the extraordinary blessings of being an American.
Ronald Reagan:
There are no "masses" in America.
Jay Cost:

Let's acknowledge that governing the United States of America is an extremely difficult task. Intentionally so. When designing our system, the Founders were faced with a dilemma. How to empower a vigorous government without endangering liberty or true republicanism? On the one hand, George III's government was effective at satisfying the will of the sovereign, but that will had become tyrannical. On the other hand, the Articles of Confederation acknowledged the rights of the states, but so much so that the federal government was incapable of solving basic problems.

The solution the country ultimately settled on had five important features: checks and balances so that the branches would police one another; a large republic so that majority sentiment was fleeting and not intensely felt; a Senate where the states would be equal; enumerated congressional powers to limit the scope of governmental authority; and the Bill of Rights to offer extra protection against the government.

The end result was a government that is powerful, but not infinitely so. Additionally, it is schizophrenic. It can do great things when it is of a single mind - but quite often it is not of one mind. So, to govern, our leaders need to build a broad consensus. . . .

Which helps explain where President Obama has gone wrong: "I won". and "Never let a serious crisis go to waste."

Update - Wretchard: Jay Cost missed something in the excellent article linked above:

“America is not ungovernable. Barack Obama has so far failed to govern it.” Cost is 99% right. But his argument misses the crucial 1 percent. The Left doesn’t want to govern, it wants to rule given the chance. It is as always willing to leave its own Big Tent behind at the decisive moment. The continual calls from the Democrat Left for Obama to “grow a spine” are really coded calls to say that the moment is now; that the President must ‘’seize the day, seize the hour.” It’s not as Cost imagines, a call to compromise. It’s a call to say that the time for compromise is over. They can drop the mask; they can hoist the Jolly Roger.

Noah Pollak’s description of the split between Amnesty International’s leadership and the head of their gender unit is the same story in a different setting. She was purged for her inability to support Amnesty International’s espousal of an Islamic radical. . . .

Saghal closed the letter describing her suspension with a recitation of her revolutionary credentials. It is an eerie passage which echoes structure for structure many of the protestations of innocence by the Old Bolsheviks when they found themselves in the cellars of the Cheka, stuffed there by a leadership that found they had outlived their usefulness. She wrote:

I have been a human rights campaigner for over three decades, defending the rights of women and ethnic minorities, defending religious freedom and the rights of victims of torture, and campaigning against illegal detention and state repression. I have raised the issue of the association of Amnesty International with groups such as Begg’s consistently within the organisation. I have now been suspended for trying to do my job and staying faithful to Amnesty’s mission to protect and defend human rights universally and impartially.

Why does she think any of this matters? The Left is not about principles. It is about itself. It is about power. Now that President Obama has been politically weakened, look for the mask to come back on. The words of sweet reason, the entreaties to “make a deal,” and feigned affection will now make a surprise reappearance. When the Left cannot rule, it will try to govern. Until the next time.

Still, the President can't help himself - he MUST put down the opposition with his rhetoric, it seems: Radley Balko - ". . none is better at trivializing opponents’ arguments than Obama."

Irresponsible Mortgage Lending: Controlling the Narrative

Andrew Cuomo, now the Attorney General of New York, is prosecuting Bank of America for fraud in connection with the financial panic and recession. But he helped set banks up for failure in an earlier job as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Bill Clinton.

It isn't entirely clear to me who deserves more blame: government officials pressuring the private sector into making it easy for people with poor credit to buy houses or Wall Street hot shots getting fancy with "monetary instruments" to bundle risky loans with others. With these fancy arrangements, banks would feel more comfortable complying with government pressure to loan to "underprivileged communities". Banks really got into the spirit of things eventually, making insane loans like the one for the home next to us, bigger than ours, sold to two nice young agricultural field workers (at least one here illegally, the other on disability). This house is now awaiting auction after foreclosure, last we heard.

This crisis developed largely because many people, at all levels of society and even outside the country, were eager to take advantage of promises inherent in the myth that we would have both perpetually increasing home values and home ownership available for all. So there is plenty of blame to go around. But the myth was almost totally engineered by respected Ivy League types in government and finance. We need to be careful not to assume that "education" always confers wisdom, or that "smart" equals "wise".

I do get irritated that the officers of Fannie and Freddie (often Democratic officials sent over to make some big bucks between government jobs, plus retired congressmen) received much less calumny than officers of banks without such direct government connections. Some (besides Franklin Raines) engaged in accounting practices similar to those which led to prosecution in private enterprises like Enron, in order to pad their own bonuses. Like Jim Johnson - one of three people first chosen to vet possible VPs for Candidate Obama (replaced when some of his "ethics problems" became noteworthy, though he still remained active in the campaign). Astonishing. And then there's Jamie Gorelick, part of the 9/11 commission (she should have been a witness, instead, given her substantive role in constructing the "Gorelick Wall" to limit information flow between intelligence agencies.

Canadian banks were not similarly pressured by their government (and by government-funded institutions like Freddie and Fannie) to make risky mortgage loans. Canadian banks weathered the crisis quite well.

That bane of liberal academics Jeff Goldstein writes about the ability of Cuomo and his friends to deflect attention from their own role in the financial meltdown:

Naturally, political animals like Cuomo will look for the easy target to scapegoat. The problem is when we allow them to get away with it — to, in essence, re-craft the narrative to insulate them while casting about for places to lay blame.

. . . the manufacturing of consent — of an agreed upon narrative enforced and patrolled by the group in power that society concedes to be “truthful” based on its having forged a majority consensus — is an ever-more desirous option: not only does it circumvent the need for internal logic or the objective assessment of fact in making its implied argument; but it is relatively cheap, in that it relies almost entirely on rhetoric — a commodity most easily marshaled by those in power to reinforce the status quo. . . .

. . . the facts can sometimes get in the way of telling a good story — and we can’t have something like reality nudging its nose under the Utopian tent of progressivism, can we?

Follow the links for a little bit of very interesting education involving facts.

Remember: "Consensus" is the only moral refuge for people who have become educated enough to believe that "truth" is only in the eye of the beholder.

Side Note: One thing Cuomo's disastrous term as head of HUD points out is how often major policies are now set by appointed officials rather than elected ones.

What People Said about the State of the Union Address

From the Real Clear Politics archives, the week of the SOTU:
TUESDAY, the day before the State of the Union Address
WEDNESDAY, January 27, the day of the address.
THURSDAY
FRIDAY
SATURDAY
SUNDAY

Roundup of libertarian and conservative live-blogging plus a little commentary.

What the White House said about the State of the Union Address

President Obama's Twitter feed indicates some of the things his people thought were important in the SOTU.

1. How to tune in
2. Organizing for America "Strategy Calls" with campaign manager David Plouffe. Because the State of the Union Address is, above all, about setting up a political strategy for your core constituency, I guess.
3. OFA staff tweeting highlights of speech. Just in case you didn't understand what was important in the speech, from the White House perspective.
4. Muddled historical references to "moving forward as one nation".
5. Hope for America's future.
6. Bank bailout was a necessary evil.
7. Recovery Act saved two million jobs. Depending on how you count, and whether you subtract jobs lost in the private sector due to spending on the public sector.
8. People are hurting. "I want a jobs bill on my desk without delay". What, exactly, is a "jobs bill"?

Orwell weeps: If the "jobs bill" contains card check unionization, it will be a "jobs bill" only insofar as it destroys them.

Wasn't the "stimulus bill" supposed to create jobs? Why was most of the "stimulus" spending delayed to coincide with election cycles?
9. Cracking down on successful banks (but going easy on Fannie and Freddie), and ACORN-controlled banks.
10. World Class education as an anti-poverty program? Domination by unions and liberal schools of education have made primary and secondary education worse than it was 40 or 50 years ago. And costs of higher education have increased faster than health care costs. To his credit, Obama has shown sporadic signs of standing up to the leadership of teacher's unions. No significant sign that he wants to control the costs of anything connected to education except for student loans.
11. America must lead in a clean energy economy. The devil's in the details on this topic.
12. Promise not to walk away from people who need health care. In other words, people who oppose his plan ARE walking away from them.
13. Respect for the military. Interesting.
14. "I never said change would be easy. When you try to do big things & make big changes it stirs passions & controversy—that’s just how it is." So, does that mean that people who don't agree with the Democrats will get more respect now, or does it mean they should continue to shut up, so we can "move forward as one nation"?
15. "We don't quit. I don't quit" Same question as above. Claudia Rosett also confused:

We don’t quit. I don’t quit.”… Who is “we” and why is that different from “I,” as in “I don’t quit” — and what is he talking about? Quit what, exactly, and how did this even come up? Quit a tradition of more than two centuries of the American spirit (did he really think we were all about to quit?). Quit his command-and-control healthcare agenda? …”Let’s seize this moment“… “start anew“…”carry the dream forward“… these are things he might have been saying to himself in the mirror last week, as the news rolled in of the Massachusetts election. But for rest of the country, the people who inhabit this union, for the world out there listening in, what is he talking about?

And the White House Staff thought Obama's cryptic statement above was worth tweeting. In writing. It's all about impressions, given how vague the statement was.

Follow-up:
1. Join Obama in his "fight for the middle class". Creepy class warfare language in the linked "letter".
2. Your chance to see the SOTU again. Plus ask a follow-up question.
3. Video of "questiontime" with House Republicans. The "highlights" below the linked video are very different from the take-away of a House Republican I heard on the radio who attended this meeting. Obama challenged them to abandon the typical, informal meeting with the President for a televised exchange, catching the Republicans a little off-guard when he sometimes turned their questions to him into attacks on them.

The President's State of the Union Address: Update - Improved Poll Numbers

Dennis Prager recommends that important speeches be read rather than watched, in order to get a better idea what was really said. The transcript of President Obama's speech is here. Many considered the speech to be a success. It was better than some recent speeches.

If you like, you can analyze the text to see if it promotes "The Obama Code" discovered in President Obama's early speeches by a professor at Berkeley. It is fascinating to me how President Obama's speeches retain their ability to impress people. Many of the things he says in his big, prepared speeches are so vague and general that they can be interpreted in a number of conflicting ways.

Update: Charles Krauthammer thinks that President Obama did quite well in his "Question Time" with House Republicans on January 29, two days after the SOTU. Krauthammer would like to see similar sessions twice a year in place of the State of the Union Address. He reminds us that, prior to Woodrow Wilson, the State of the Union report was submitted by the President to the Congress in writing. I like that idea. Written facts about the State of the Union followed by give-and-take with Congress, instead of a quasi-"throne speech".

The President got a nice bump in his approval ratings from his speech and the "Question Time" with Republicans, with his Rasmussen rolling approval rating average peaking on February 1, shortly after the "Question Time". His poll numbers went down again as people learned what was in his new budget. Watch what Obama does, not what he says.

On the day the POTUS gave the State of the Union Address, he was at an overall approval/ disapproval disadvantage (46-53%) and the approval index (based on strong approval/disapproval) was at a -15. Within a day or two of his speech the President's numbers took a huge bounce. By this past Monday, his overall approval /disapproval numbers were almost even and his approval index reached its highest number since mid October: -4.

This past Sunday reports about the President's budget began to leak out. On Monday, the budget was officially released, and voters saw that all of the pretty fiduciary responsibility talk within the SOTU was just that, talk. With that Obama's approval numbers dived faster than a congressman rushing to spend our last dollar. Each one of his approval numbers are now worse than they were the day of the State Of the Union.

The feisty, pugnacious Mark Levin plays clips of Democrats speaking about health care to friendly audiences, 2009 and earlier: Politicians on the Left are good at making promises to the general public. They tell the truth only to their friends. Sometimes.