In announcing his tax deal with Republican leaders the other day, President Obama managed simultaneously to express support for the package’s job-creating prospects and reiterate his perennial talking points in favor of increasing top marginal tax rates.

Meanwhile, Republicans coming off an election victory of historic proportions are settling for the status quo on tax rates, agreeing to raise taxes through a revival of the  “death tax” and signing on to as much as $100 billion in additional federal spending for another unemployment extension plus additional stimulus items.  Alarmingly, all of this is transpiring just a month before the arrival in Washington of new Tea Party Congressmen promising as a first step to cut $100 billion in federal discretionary spending.  And over in the House, Democrats are working to prevent even the possibility of any cuts by sending up a continuing resolution to fund the government through the next 9-plus months of fiscal 2011 at bloated pre-blowout election funding levels.

How is it that President Obama is the one proposing a “middle class tax cut” while Republicans are signing on to a tax increase and even more federal spending? The danger here is that the man who brought us $2.7 trillion in deficit spending in just two years is preparing to make the case that he is the tax-cutter and the Republicans are the big spenders.  

I am traveling in Europe this week and so may be missing something important here.  Hence a question for Ricochet:  Is this tax deal the best pro-growth deal we can hope for or are conservatives being rolled by the beginnings of Triangulation, the Sequel?

Which is why the euro may be doomed.

Is doomed, according to investor Jim Rogers, speaking at a Reuters conference yesterday.

The idea that the currency union that holds the EU together might collapse was, for a long time, unthinkable.  And even now, it looks unlikely.  But people are thinking about it, in a methodical and sober way.  From the Economist:

Introducing a new currency would be difficult but not impossible. A government could simply pass a law saying that the wages of public workers, welfare cheques and government debts would henceforth be paid in a new currency, converted at an official fixed rate. Such legislation would also require all other financial dealings—private-sector pay, mortgages, stock prices, bank loans and so on—to be switched to the new currency.

Once you start thinking about it, though -- once it becomes not-unthinkable -- it's really just a matter of figuring out ways to get over the hurdles: there would be banking chaos for a while, and of course it would be hard to figure out what bonds were worth, but those are things that the central banking industry is designed to work out.

Meaning: it could be done.  Especially by a strong country like Germany, fed up with endless bailouts of more profligate and insolvent partners.  Again, from the Economist:

Should it opt to leave, [Germany] would have an incentive not to convert its stock of euro-denominated debts to claims in a new, stronger currency. It could instead choose to repay those depreciating debts over time. Rather than invite legal disputes, however, it might instead go for a comprehensive conversion and keep balance-sheets straight. Germany would in any case be able to issue cheap debt in the run-up to conversion. A rush out of euros into German assets in anticipation of revaluation would drive up the prices of Bunds—conceivably to a point where the interest rates on them were negative.

Probably won't happen, of course.  But the first step in making the unthinkable happen is thinking about it.  And there seems to be a lot of thinking about it going on.

Regardless of its merits, the proposed Obama-McConnell “tax deal” is turning into a major clarifying point for Barack Obama and his presidency – clarifying, specifically, for whether Obama can meet the real test of leadership, which is getting people to do things they don’t particularly want to do.  A President who cannot persuade or force his own party in Congress to do what they are disinclined to do, on an issue of major importance, is not a leader; he is a wounded duck.  Recall Jimmy Carter, circa 1977 – it was Carter’s inability to get the Democratic-controlled Senate to endorse his comprehensive energy program that first gave rise to the widespread perception that Carter was not a very effective leader – and just possibly in over his head.

Can Obama get the votes on this?  The track record to date is not inspiring.  Despite an 18-month record of legislative “accomplishment” invariably trotted out by his defenders, it’s not clear that he has yet persuaded anyone to do anything they didn’t already want to do.  He certainly hasn’t persuaded Congressional Republicans in any numbers to support any of his major initiatives.  And while Democrats in very large numbers have supported all of them, it’s pretty clear that no persuasion was needed.  The Reid/Pelosi crowd wanted health care reform; they wanted the bailouts; they wanted the stimulus.  And although some wanted more, the limiting factor has always been what could get 50 votes, or 60 votes, or 218 votes – not what the President wanted or didn’t want.

So I think this is shaping up to be the first real personal test of Obama’s presidency – a test not of the Democrats’ strength collectively, but of Obama’s own ability to lead.  If he pulls it off, he’ll be well-positioned to be the “broker” – if he wants to be – among the different factions in Congress for the next two years, and he will be the decider of what gets brokered and what doesn’t.  If he can’t pull this off, he’s likely to be reduced, at least for a while, to sideline-player status, chipping in every once in a while with a, “Hey, I’m still relevant here.  Hello?  Somebody?”

I’m not particularly happy about the GOP’s compromise with Obama and I derive no particular pleasure in the fact that the left is furious at Obama over the deal, but it is that phenomenon I wish to briefly address.

Conservatives unhappy with the deal are upset over things like extension of the unemployment benefits, which they don’t believe will help the recipients in the long run, but are sure will exacerbate our exploding national debt.

But what about the angry left? Why are they so mad at Obama over this? Well, I don’t think it’s because he reneged on his promise to stick it to the “wealthy” – those filthy rich families earning $250,000 or more per year. Leftists, being ends-justifies-the-means sorts don’t get unduly exercised over deceits, broken promises and the like in service to the cause. No, it has to involve the substance of the deal itself.

Extending the Bush tax rates for the highest income earners infuriates the left. Before the deal was consummated, MoveOn.org ran a video ad complaining bitterly about it. After the deal was announced they became even more apoplectic.

Just think about this. You surely don’t think for a minute that the left is angry because of the $700 billion of revenue they say this extension will cost. If revenue, deficits and debt were their concerns they would hate Obama’s guts long before now, not to mention that they would be focusing on the much greater loss of revenue the rate extensions for all other income brackets will cause.

No, it has nothing to do with the alleged losses of revenues. It has to do with their frustration at not being able to punish the “rich.” I am convinced they are more driven by the negative of sticking it to the “wealthy” than they are helping others. This is not a matter of robbing Peter to pay Paul. It’s a matter of just robbing Peter to punish him for faring better in “life’s lottery.” It’s the same mentality that drove their former hero, candidate Barack Obama, to confess to Charlie Gibson that he favored increases in capital gains tax rates despite empirical evidence that such rate increases decreased revenues because “it’s a matter of fairness.” You see, in the leftist’s mind, the concept of “fairness” is satisfied not only if you take from some and give to others, but if you punish everyone just to make sure you stick it to the wealthy.

I think that’s a sick mindset and I think we should recognize it for what it is.

What’s the end of this kind of thinking, after all? The “wealth” already pay way more in income taxes than all other income brackets – way more. Their marginal rates will still be higher with this extension. At what point would the socialist confiscators believe fairness had actually been achieved were they dictatorially running the show?

For all the moralizing and sermonizing we hear from the left, I rarely hear those of us on the right countering their moral arguments either defending the moral superiority of free market systems or counterpunching the left by pointing out their own immoral urges that drive them to want to punish a group of people. How is that morally defensible? They’re not all driven by such motives, but significant numbers are, which makes this worthy of our consideration.

Sarah Palin is drawing some criticism from predictable quarters over a "controversial" segment on her reality show where she hunts and kills a caribou. You can watch the recent clip below: 

Palin reacted to the criticism on her facebook page by writing, "Tonight's hunting episode of Sarah Palin's Alaska 'controversial'? Really? Unless you've never worn leather shoes, sat upon a leather couch, or eaten a piece of meat, save your condemnation of tonight's episode. I remain proudly intolerant of anti-hunting hypocrisy. :)"

To give you a sense of the temper tantrums liberals are throwing over the clip, here's the snarky Aaron Sorkin on Palin's hunting segment. In the Huffington Post today, he writes:

I eat meat, chicken and fish, have shoes and furniture made of leather, and PETA is not ever going to put me on the cover of their brochure and for these reasons Palin thinks it's hypocritical of me to find what she did heart-stoppingly disgusting. I don't think it is, and here's why.

Like 95% of the people I know, I don't have a visceral (look it up) problem eating meat or wearing a belt. But like absolutely everybody I know, I don't relish the idea of torturing animals. I don't enjoy the fact that they're dead and I certainly don't want to volunteer to be the one to kill them and if I were picked to be the one to kill them in some kind of Lottery-from-Hell, I wouldn't do a little dance of joy while I was slicing the animal apart.

...

And you didn't just do it for fun and you didn't just do it for money. That was the first moose ever murdered for political gain. You knew there'd be a protest from PETA and you knew that would be an opportunity to hate on some people, you witless bully. What a uniter you'd be -- bringing the right together with the far right.

First of all, is anyone else bothered by how condescending Sorkin's command for us to look the word "visceral" up is? We get it, you're so smart, and we're mumbling neanderthals. Second, do you like how he conflates hunting with "torturing" animals? Third, how do we feel about the term "murder" being applied to the act of intentionally killing an animal? It seems to me that in general, you can murder human beings, but you can only kill animals.

I've never been hunting before, but I can understand the thrill of it even though I'm not sure I would like killing an animal. I'd be curious to hear from any Rico-hunters out there. Where did you hunt? What was the experience like? One hunter I spoke to a few years ago, when I voiced concern about killing an animal, explained to me that hunting actually made him feel closer to nature and its creatures. Does that resonate with you?

An anecdote that gets passed around in foreign-correspondent clubs goes something like this: Some expat, we'll call him Waldo, is working in a country where the government is known for enthusiastically surveilling its citizens. Waldo's refrigerator breaks. He's horrified when hours later the repairman shows up promptly and fixes it efficiently. Why is he horrified? Because he never called the repairman.

I've been having a few problems with my Internet connection lately. I'm paying for the highest-speed service, but it's been dial-up slow. I called TTNET a few times to complain about this. This resulted in my service being switched off without warning, after which it was restored to the same molasses speed. 

Yesterday evening, at my wit's end, I put out an appeal on Twitter and Facebook: Did any of my friends have the number of someone at TTNET who might take this problem seriously? Maybe someone in the PR department?

Half hour later, phone rings. TTNET calling. How may we help? 

Now, if I were the paranoid type, I'd draw a paranoid conclusion. But I'm not remotely the paranoid type, and in fact, I've drawn quite a different conclusion: Türk Telekom and TTNET are excellent companies that take customer service very seriously. They have a few kinks to work out at the level of call-center complaints, but basically, they really work hard to make their customers happy.

I'm not sure who forwarded my plea to the attention of the right people, but I figure I've got a few thousand Facebook and Twitter friends, so someone did.   TTNET in turn responded quickly, courteously and effectively. I'm given to understand from Ricochet editors in California that the service I've received from them would be unheard of there. 

The moral of this story isn't that Big Brother is watching me--although if I'm wrong with that, I suppose I'm also fine with that: If Big Brother gets my Internet fixed fast, I think Big Brother and I can be good friends. (And by the way, BB, my vacuum cleaner really isn't getting the cat fur up the way it ought. It would be great if you could send someone to have a look at it.) 

But the fact is, it's pretty rare for Big Brother to fix anything fast for you. A privatized company, though--that's another story:

Privatization endeavour of Türk Telekom has been a milestone in Turkish privatization history. It is the objective of the Republic of Turkey to foster a viable and competitive telecommunications sector, to attract world-class partners for Türk Telekom with a view of increasing efficiency and service quality as well as executing the privatization process on a timely basis responding to market conditions. In search of an interactive process, a market testing study has been undertaken during September and October 2003, in order to design the most pertinent privatization strategy for Türk Telekom.

Consequently, the market testing study is completed during the months of September and October in 2003 and the Council of Ministers Decree encompassing feedback received during the aforementioned market testing study was issued on November 13, 2003. Accordingly, minimum 51% of Türk Telekom shares were to be offered as a block sale of company shares, while following the block sale the remaining shares could  be privatized under various privatization methods including the public offering. Turkey has secured an investment friendly environment for privatizations with regulations matching European standards. With the enactment of law 5189, the foreign ownership restriction on the part of foreign investors has been lifted, the scope of the golden share has been restructured and the satellite business has been taken out of Türk Telekom to function as a separate public entity.

TTNET: Margaret Thatcher would be proud. And unsurprised.

Andrew, I read your post on freeing Assange with interest. I'm genuinely not sure where I stand.

Let me pose a hypothetical question. Let's say that we believe Assange is on the verge of releasing the name of a credible, high-level North Korean informant who last week succeeded in conveying to us a message that Pyongyang plans to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Seoul in January. He has access to the details of these plans. He is scheduled to transmit them to us next week. There is no way to contact our source in a non-alerting way to warn him that he's on the verge of exposure. There is nothing we can do to rescue him. All the information we've received from him thus far has proven accurate.

Would you support assassinating Assange to protect this source? If not, why not?

Would all your arguments not apply in this case, too? 

I’ve always loved the Beatles, despite Paul McCartney’s unfortunate habit of saying stupid things and the late John Lennon’s lamentable communistic and atheistic sentiments as expressed in the song “Imagine.”

Sir McCartney is still a helpless cause.  But it turns out that Lennon's "no possessions, no religion" reputation was more fiction than fact.  In late 1980, shortly before his untimely death, Lennon sat for his last major interview with Playboy.  The interview revealed a man much more complex and much less naïve than the caricature of Lennon propagated by his adoring fans would suggest.  Jordan Michael Smith at @TAC highlights some of the most surprising parts of the interview. 

John Lennon on foreign aid:

When it was pointed out that a Beatles reunion could possibly raise $200 million for a poverty-stricken country in South America, Lennon had no time for it. “You know, America has poured billions into places like that. It doesn’t mean a damn thing. After they’ve eaten that meal, then what? It lasts for only a day. After the $200,000,000 is gone, then what? It goes round and round in circles…You can pour money in forever. After Peru, then Harlem, then Britain. There is no one concert. We would have to dedicate the rest of our lives to one world concert tour, and I’m not ready for it.”

When it came to politics, Lennon admitted to having been motivated by guilt more than anything.  He explained away his liberal activism of the sixties and seventies almost as an atonement for the sin of being rich.

“I dabbled in so-called politics in the late Sixties and Seventies more out of guilt than anything,” he revealed. “Guilt for being rich, and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn’t enough and you have to go and get shot or something, or get punched in the face, to prove I’m one of the people. I was doing it against my instincts.”

John Lennon the atheist?  Complete fiction.

“People got the image I was anti-Christ or antireligion,” he said. “I’m not at all. I’m a most religious fellow. I’m religious in the sense of admitting there is more to it than meets the eye. I’m certainly not an atheist.”

And perhaps what rehabilitated John Lennon’s image for me, more than anything else:

Lennon died as something of an individualist. “Produce your own dream,” he advised in lieu of getting involved in politics. “If you want to save Peru, go save Peru. It’s quite possible to do anything, but not if you put it on the leaders and the parking meters. Don’t expect Carter or Reagan or John Lennon or Yoko Ono or Bob Dylan or Jesus Christ to come and do it for you. You have to do it yourself.”

Pay no attention to the Wikileaks cables showing your State Department at work arranging the much-ballyhooed political “consensus” in favor of reducing carbon dioxide emissions through Soviet-style industrial policy.  Look past last year’s Climategate emails revealing the “settled science” of manmade global warming as a fiction cooked up by self-dealing scientists eager for social transformation, greater prestige and more funding. 

You can still be a force for good, but only if you act fast.

Fortunately, for any of you concerned about Al Gore’s opulent lifestyle and crestfallen by the possibility that EPA won’t quite squeeze cap-and-trade through the back door, carbon offsets can be purchased at my local airport.  Buy some before you jet off for that environmental conference in Cancun!  Strangely, however, CO2 is no longer positioned alongside polar bears drowning in glacier melt.  Now the harmless gas you exhale is erroneously pegged as another filthy, sky-obscuring pollutant.   The cold truth:  anthropogenic global warming has passed its sell-by date. 

This just in:

Fifteen-year-olds in the U.S. ranked 25th among peers from 34 countries on a math test and scored in the middle in science and reading, while China’s Shanghai topped the charts, raising concern that the U.S. isn’t prepared to succeed in the global economy.

Pretend you're shocked.

According to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, “This should be a massive wake-up call to the entire country.”

Really? I thought this was a massive wake up call: The fact that American children between the ages of 8 to 18 spend an average of 7+ hours per day engaged with various forms of media, a number that does not include media multi-tasking (watching TV while surfing the net) or texting (add 1.5 hours per day).

But back to the shocking test scores. According to Bloomberg News:

The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development, which represents 34 countries, today released the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment. For the first time, the test broke out the performance of China’s Shanghai region, which topped every country in all academic categories. The U.S. government considers the test one of the most comprehensive measures of international achievement.

Even without the Shanghai regional results, the US lags behind South Korea, Finland, Japan and Canada -- countries that led the results among the 470,000 students worldwide who took the 2009 exam.

The Obama administration's solution to this "massive wakeup call"? National curriculum standards and revamped teacher pay that rewards student performance over longevity or credentials.

Wow. Talk about your radical solutions.

Meanwhile, this problem was best illustrated back in November 2009 (right around the time our students were bombing these international assessment tests on behalf of the USA) by a video produced by Time Warner Cable’s “Connect a Million Minds” (CAMM) initiative.

Responding to previous international rankings that prove we’re far behind the rest of the world in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) scores, CAMM set out to identify the differing attitudes about these subjects among teens from several countries.

Not surprisingly, they learned that students in Finland, China and Australia understand how crucial it is to work hard, compete against other students, and master the skills that will enable them to find jobs in these areas.

American students “hate math” (what did it ever do to them?), preferring to “text,” “socialize,” “watch Youtube videos” and generally not appear to be intellectually engaged. (Want to be annoyed? Watch CAMM’s video here). 

The CAMM initiative is looking to connect mentors to US students to show them how cool it is to study STEM subjects and work in related fields, proving that math and science now must compete in the arena of public relations for the attention of America’s over-indulged youth.

Yo, Arnie. Merit pay for teachers is not the problem.

More likely, the problem rests at the feet of the teacher education elite, who long ago usurped American public education for the cause of social justice and social engineering. Thanks to their “child centered” pedagogy, we’re more concerned about righting injustice than teaching kids the knowledge and skills they will need to be truly competitive, self-sufficient and successful.

We’re infusing self-esteem, while in far away Finland, Australia and South Korea, and especially in Shanghai, they’re simply teaching math, science and reading to an eager population of knowledge-thirsty learners.

This would explain why their kids are acing the tests, while ours aren’t. 

Sad.  Elizabeth Edwards died today of breast cancer.  It can't have been easy to have faced what she faced these past few years.  May she rest in peace.

Negotiating the tax cut deal with the Republicans, apparently, was like negotiating with terrorists.  From the DC Examiner:

During a press conference moments ago, President Obama explained his decision to concede to Republican demands to extend the Bush tax cuts to those who make more than $250,000 by comparing congressional GOP to hostage-takers: "It's tempting not to negotiate with hostage takers, unless the hostage gets harmed...The hostage was the American people."

Okay, so maybe not terrorists.  But at least kidnappers.

I'm not sure what the strategy is, here.  I guess it's triangulation?  If so, he's nailed it.  Insulting the Republicans? Check.  Alienating left wing Democrats? Check:

Mr. Obama's allies in the Capitol gave the agreement a harsh review. Ms. Pelosi said the estate tax plan "would help only 39,000 of America's richest families, while adding about $25 billion more to the deficit." The plan would exempt all estate wealth under $5 million.

The problem with this strategy is that it makes the president seem weak and pushed around.  And it only really works, I think, if he can personalize the choice, as Bill Clinton did in the aftermath of the 1994 midterms, when he made it a Clinton v. Gingrich matchup.  Clinton did a pretty good job of demonizing Gingrich (who did a pretty good job of it himself, too) but that's a high-stakes game, and it requires huge reservoirs of personal charm.

I'm not sure our current president has those reservoirs, huge or otherwise.

Recently, I undertook to highlight the dangerous foolishness inherent in David Axelrod's lament that the government just doesn't have $700 billion tucked away in a mason jar in one of Congressman Rangel's rental properties, waiting to be distributed as cuts. The idea that that which you earn is not really yours, but instead belongs to a government which may or may not allow you to keep a portion of it strikes me as despotic in its assumptions.

My larger contention is that we on the right would be well served to refute the terms of the debate with the collectivists at the outset. The polls indicate that only 20% of the population describe themselves as liberal, so why should the majority acquiesce to their paradigm? I am unable, for example, to listen to the news without hearing politicians and pundits of every political persuasion discuss the urgent need to extend the current tax rates for the middle class.

What constitutes the middle class and who decides its qualifications? Is there an application for membership? Are there dues requirements? What are the income requirements? Do official titles matter? For that matter, what are the parameters for the lower class, if there even is such a thing? I was kicked out of American government class in high school once for making a rather blunt assessment of Jimmy Carter's effectiveness during the Iranian hostage crisis. Is it similarly possible to get kicked out of the middle class and into the lower class? Who would I have to insult to pull that one off? Can I get promoted if I sing the praises of Frank Rich?

As a little boy I asked my parents if we were poor, to which they responded that "poor" is a state or mind. Likewise, since no one has been able to define exactly what constitutes the middle class, I suspect that it too is a state of mind. The whole concept of dividing people against each other on the basis of class was given an energetic boost by Karl Marx from whose forlorn mind rose the progressive income tax, an idea whose midwife in the US was the American left. In fact, the process of treating people not as individuals, but rather as faceless cogs in the great assemblies whose identities are framed by income levels, ethnicity, gender, or class is utterly alien to America's founding.

On the contrary, to the extent that we treat people as groups rather than individuals, we dehumanize them, and to what end? To facilitate the process by which the state and its enthusiasts pit us against each other and convince us that our group can only succeed at the expense of another, and that such success depends ultimately on the wise and benevolent hand of our superiors in Washington DC, as guided by the Center For American Progress.

There was an old story about an elderly gentleman who became disoriented in the French Quarter in New Orleans and wandered into a Bourbon St. house of ill repute. A young lady met him at the door and asked, "Would you like some super sex?" Hard of hearing, the old gentleman replied, "Oh, I believe I'll have the soup." Likewise, I may be philosophically hard of hearing, but I reject the efforts of the collectivist to herd Americans into groups, denying individual aspirations, desires, and liberty. I insist that the guy who owns the trucking company and the guy who drives the truck depend on each other for the success of both, and reject outright that one is more entitled to his property than the other. All Americans deserve a government that respects its own proper limitations and secures the freedom of its citizens. This class warfare nonsense is destructive, and we would be better off to dispense with its terminology as well. Like the gentleman in New Orleans, I believe I'll have the soup.

My friend David Brooks keeps arguing for "energetic" government of the kind George Washington and Abraham Lincoln gave us.  To which, as Ricochet readers may recall, I've replied that if David is willing to shrink federal spending to proportion of GDP it represented when Lincoln took office, I'd be willing to give him just as energetic a government as he'd like.

Now I see that Charles Murray replied to David this past autumn: 

[W]here does David get the idea that the “energetic government” he lauds in the administrations of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln was more or less the same thing conceptually as 'energetic government' now, on a somewhat smaller scale?

There's no need to go all the way back to Abraham Lincoln, Murray argues, to observe a federal government that remained fundamentally limited.  

[C]onsider the federal budget in 1963, on the eve of President Lyndon Johnson’s ascension to power. In 2008, dollars, as are all the numbers that follow, the federal government spent $782 billion that year, almost half of which went to defense. The entire federal government spent just $259 billion on domestic non-defense items (I exclude interest payments on the national debt). In 2008, while we were still under the compassionately conservative eye of President George W. Bush instead of the spendthrift liberals, the same domestic non-defense items amounted to $1.7 trillion. Shall we remove Social Security from that calculation? Then the numbers go from $150 billion in 1963 to $1.1 trillion in 2007—a sevenfold increase.

You don’t increase spending by those amounts without changing the role of government in ways that go to the heart of the American project. That truth is reflected in the qualitative record. In 1963, 30 years after the New Deal started, the federal government still played little role in vast swathes of American life, from K-12 education to the way people went about providing goods and services to their fellow citizens. We can argue about which of the subsequent interventions were warranted and which were not, but not about this: The way that presidents and Congresses see their power to intervene in American life in 2010 is profoundly different from the way they saw it in 1963. In 1963, among mainstream Democrats as well as Republicans, it was accepted that an overarching purpose of the American Constitution was to limit the arenas in which government could act. Now, the recognition of that purpose has all but disappeared—in the executive branch, in the Supreme Court, and in Congresses controlled by Republicans as well as by Democrats. 

The change in size or degree of the federal government has indeed represented a change in kind--and the change took place during the lifetime of perhaps half of Americans alive today, including David Brooks.

(Hat tip to my Powerline friend, Scott Johnson.)

In his recent post calling for a repeal of the ban on incandescent light bulbs Kenneth wrote, "Light bulbs may be small things, but liberty is a big thing."  Looks like Congressman Upton was persuaded:

Republican Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan – the man running against Texas Rep. Joe Barton to be Chairman of the Energy and Commerce committee in the next Congress– has reversed his position on CFL light bulbs. The move is significant not only because Upton wants to be chairman of one of the House’s most powerful committees, but also because he championed the incandescent bulb ban and switch to CFLs just three short years ago.

Now, Upton says that if he becomes chair of the Energy Committee, he will help undo the law he was instrumental in getting passed. He even went a step further by admitting Congress can make mistakes – a candid admission that symbolizes Upton may be trying to solidify his conservative credentials with the incoming class of “Tea Party” Republicans.

“The last thing we wanted to do was infringe upon personal liberties — and this has been a good lesson that Congress does not always know best,” Upton said in a statement.

Just goes to show you that for $3.47 a month, you too can make a stand and have your voice heard!

Maybe he felt he didn't have to wear one because he is one, but whatever the reason, Julian Assange should not be arrested, prosecuted or harassed for having sex while naked - or having his condom break or refusing to wear one or whatever the absurd charge is.  First, the man was sleeping with radical feminists at the time, so he's suffered enough. 

But also, we can't support the grotesque misuse of the law, even to nail someone we dislike.  The two women who swore out complaints after having a piece of Assange were both apparently perfectly willing, friendly and affectionate with the man at the time.  And while Sweden can afford to have arcane sex laws because they have ceased to reproduce, I find it enormously distasteful to see a man essentially prosecuted on sex charges because he leaked government secrets.  Think about that, really.  They can do stuff like that to anyone.  It ain't right, it won't stand and, in all seriousness, or in as much seriousness as I'm capable of, it's a flagrant abuse of power that conservatives should reject.

Well, it's better than growing out your armpit hairs for a cause, I suppose--but I still don't like it! The Daily Caller intrepidly reports (via Hot Air):

This holiday season, Feministing.com, an “online community for feminists,” is encouraging women to opt out of eyebrow waxing appointments in favor of looking like “Frida,” the girlfriend of Marxist Diego Rivera....Feministing.com is calling for women to grow unibrows during December, which they are trying to dub “Decembrow. 

So instead of women who look like this...

We get women who look like this (Salma Hayek played Frida in a 2002 movie):

Honestly, what's next?

While the rest of us our holiday shopping and happily baking Christmas cookies in the coming days, a huffy Al Sharpton, with his eyebrows knit, plans on marching straight to the FCC's offices in DC next week and demanding that Rush Limbaugh be taken off the air. This is a threat that the reverend has been repeating for weeks now, and which he restated last night on MSNBC. Watch it below.

Rush "doesn't have the right" to use public airwaves to broadcast his radio show, the reverend said. Sharpton proposed that the FCC sets "standards" (read: a speech code) for what is and isn't allowed on the air.

Rush Limbaugh has the right to say whatever he wants to say, he does not have the right, though, to do it on publicly regulated airwaves. The FCC has the responsibility to set standards...You can't say -- in the name of free speech, you can't say anything you want...We're not talking about stopping free speech...We're not telling Rush don't say what you want to say, say it at home, not on public airwaves.

The public has the right "to not be offended," Sharpton said.

...the public also has the right to not tune in to Rush's program, just like we have the right to not tune into the reverend's own radio show (a right that I vigorously exercise on a daily basis). 

Do you remember the “Death Panels?” The phrase, of course, belongs to Sarah Palin. On her Facebook page – on Friday, 5 August 2009 – she attacked President Obama’s plans for rationing healthcare, writing:

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Palin was by no means the first to attack Obama’s plan in this fashion. In her post, she cited a speech by Minnesota Congressman Michele Bachman. Moreover, on 1 July of that year, in my very first post on Powerline, which was entitled Obama’s Tyrannical Ambition, I had myself raised the issue. After pointing to our President’s extraordinary political discipline, I had added that once in a while, “when Obama gets separated from his teleprompter, the mask slips a tad,” citing his famous remark to Joe the Plumber about spreading the wealth around. “Something of the sort,” I continued,

happened again last week--when, at a carefully staged rally for the administration's health care proposal, to which the flacks who run ABC News tellingly invited no one who regards the current healthcare arrangement as even remotely satisfactory--President Obama responded to a question by acknowledging that his plan aimed to reduce medical costs by aligning "incentives" in such a fashion as to discourage the sick and the dying from undergoing "additional tests" or taking "additional drugs that the evidence shows is not necessarily going to improve care."

Obama's choice of words was, as always, soothing. But anyone familiar with the healthcare debate will immediately recognize what he left unsaid. We all know that, wherever there is socialized medicine, there is rationing. Cutting costs is, in fact, its rationale, and this end is achieved by a refusal on the part of the government to pay for care that the bureaucrats judge uneconomic. Already now, in the semi-socialized system to which we have been made subject, those consigned to HMOs come up against gatekeepers charged with shaving costs by restricting care.

Why, we might ask, should one have to wait months or even years for a hip-replacement operation? Why should one be denied a cataract operation if one is over a certain age? What business is it of Barack Obama's whether I choose to spend my own hard-earned money on procedures thought to have only a limited chance of success? What gives him--or, for that matter, anyone else--the right to make decisions that are for me a matter of life and death?

Defenders of Obama's proposal will reply that I am misrepresenting his proposal. No one, they will say, will be forced to give up the health insurance they have. Technically, of course, this is true. But what President Obama calls the "incentives" will be structured in such a way that employers will no longer have to offer coverage, and to save themselves the expense (which is considerable), they will seize the opportunity to opt out, and then we will have no choice.

Perhaps we will then be left free to spend as we see fit the money left to us after we have paid for the government-run insurance program. Perhaps we will be able to go into the private market and pay for a hip-replacement operation, a cataract operation, or for tests and procedures that our doctor recommends but that the government-run insurance program refuses to pay for.

Here is where Obama's "incentives" reappear. The government-run insurance program will, for all practical purposes, be a monopsony--the sole purchaser. It will be in a bargaining position enabling it to dictate the price that it will pay, and, of course, it will pay very little. You, as an individual purchaser, will have no leverage at all; and, like those not covered by employer-sponsored insurance plans today, you will have to pay through the nose. Unless you are filthy rich, you may well have to wait your turn for that hip-replacement operation, forego that cataract operation, or do without those expensive tests and procedures. In sum, you will not be in the driver's seat.

To grasp what is at stake, one must step back and consider what sort of thinking underpins the drive for what is called "health care reform." There was a time in the United States when we lived under a regime of individual rights, and as individuals we assumed responsibility for our own welfare. We worked; we saved; and we took pride in looking after ourselves. Many of us still think in this fashion, but this is not the manner in which our masters now think. We may be the heirs of the men who adopted the Declaration of Independence; those who rule us are the offspring of the Progressives, and men of this temper have dominated our political life for almost a century now.

It is symptomatic of Sarah Palin’s political genius that the moral point it took me seven paragraphs and more to make she managed to sum up in two words.

She was, of course, vilified for what she said. Rachel Weiner at The Huffington Post called her assertion “an extraordinary, unsupported and incendiary claim.” In the aftermath, in The New York Times, as The Catholic League for Religion and Civil Rights pointed out some weeks ago, Paul Krugman wrote nineteen separate columns denouncing what he called the "death panel smear" and the "death panel lie" and describing the "death panel people" as being part of "the lunatic fringe"; Maureen Dowd attacked those who engage in "their loopy rants on death panels"; and Frank Rich denounced those who spoke of "fictions like 'death panels.'" In September, in an editorial, the Times lamented "the cynical demagoguing about 'death panels.'"

All of this adds spice to the fact that on 14 November – in a little-remarked appearance on the ABC News program This Week in which he focused his attention on escalating healthcare costs – Paul Krugman, who was separated from his computer keyboard, let his mask slip a tad, telling listeners that “some years down the pike, we're going to get the real solution, which is going to be a combination of death panels and sales taxes." As Nat Henthoff intimates in a piece first posted yesterday, Krugman and his colleagues owe Sarah Palin an apology. I suspect, however, that working at The New York Times means never having to say you’re sorry.

The governor of South Sinai has put his intellectual heft behind the theory that sharks involved in attacks off Sharm El-Sheik are controlled by Israel via GPS:

Speaking on the public TV program "Egypt Today" yesterday, a specialist introduced as "Captain Mustafa Ismail, a famous diver in Sharm El Sheikh," said that the sharks involved in the attack are ocean sharks and do not live in Egypt's waters.

When asked by the anchor how the shark entered Sharm El Sheikh waters, he burst out, "no, it's who let them in?"

Urged to elaborate, Ismail said that he recently got a call from an Israeli diver in Eilat telling him that they captured a small shark with a GPS planted in its back, implying that the sharks were monitored to attack in Egypt's waters only.  

"Why would these sharks travel 4000 km and not have any accidents until they entered Sinai waters?" asked Ismail.

Earlier today, General Abdel-Fadeel Shosha, the governor of South Sinai, backed Ismail's theory. In a phone call to the TV program, he said that it is possible that Israeli intelligence, Mossad, is behind the incidents and that they are doing it to undermine the Egyptian tourism industry. He added that Egypt needs time to investigate the theory.

Meanwhile, Assange has been arrested. And the cats are licking their paws, satisfied that everyone is utterly flummoxed.

That cat, by the way, has been neutered, so forget it, Sweden: Your phony rape charges will never stick.  

(Tip: Ricochet Cabal Member Damian Counsell. Thanks, Damian, care for an anchovy?)

So it's Election Day 2008 and someone tells you that in two years' time one of the biggest sensations in the GOP is going to be the overweight, demotic Republican governor of New Jersey. He's going to be the object of admiration for every would-be Republican governor in the nation. And, oh yeah, his YouTube videos are going to get more views than Barack Obama's. You buying?

I’m fascinated by the Chris Christie phenomenon because (A) I’m swept up in it and (B) I think he might be the reincarnation of the sainted Grover Cleveland (I also think Mitch Daniels may be the second coming of Calvin Coolidge – check out the hairline).

Speaking as a recovering speechwriter, I think one of the major elements to Christie’s success is that he doesn’t need people like me (or even far more able hands like Peter and Bill). He may have some help on prepared remarks, but the Chris Christie you remember is extemporaneous and authentic. In modern politics, that’s not just remarkable; it’s revolutionary.

Given Christie’s meteoric rise, we should expect a bumper crop of copycats (leave it to politicians to think that authenticity is best achieved through imitation). This is akin to the Hollywood phenomenon where everyone copies the last box office hit until the next original idea breaks through – and gets its own mimics. In the end, though, it’s the truly innovative that we remember. Chris Christie is a delightful tonic for those of us who worried that species was going extinct in professional politics.

A few days ago I wrote about Mike Pence’s excellent Hillsdale speech on the president’s proper constitutional role. I noted that we conservatives devote great energy to criticizing liberals for their routine, expedient disregard for the Constitution, but don’t, often enough, make the affirmative case for the Constitution as the institutional source of our liberties.

Analogously, I’m not sure we do as good a job as the liberals do in articulating the affirmative case for our philosophy of government and our policies. It seems we find ourselves too often on the defensive, focusing more on liberal fallacies and misdeeds than promoting our cause. For example, we defend against the charge that the Bush tax rates for the highest income bracket are evil, greedy uncompassionate, and unfair, rather than say, promoting the flat tax. Paul Ryan’s “Roadmap” is a notable exception.

The left appears more motivated and certainly more consistent, nay relentless, in pressing their cause. In the last few days, I was reminded of this as when rereading the Foreword to Whittaker Chambers’ conservative classic, “Witness,” and the great struggle he described between two competing faiths: Communism and freedom -- between those who rely on man for deliverance and those who rely on God. Upon reading this, I thought of the modern leftists’ “faith,” which rivals in intensity that of the communists of whom Chambers wrote.

I sometimes wonder whether many Christians and conservatives have as much faith in what we believe, for which there is an abundance of probative evidence, as liberals have concerning their views on the environment, macroevolution, Keynesian economics, foreign policy appeasement, etc. against which there is substantial evidence.

Chambers’ words in describing the conflicting “faiths” of his time are worth underscoring as we contemplate their relevance for the ongoing worldview wars in which we are engaged, which are not that different. If we were naïve before Obama about the extent to which liberals will go with unchecked power, we no longer have an excuse. Granted, not all leftists are Communists, but all Communists (and fascists) are leftists.

Listen to Chambers describe the nature and awesome power of the communists’ faith: 

Their power, whose nature baffles the rest of the world, because in a large measure the rest of the world has lost that power, is the power to hold convictions and to act on them. It is the same power that moves mountains; it is also an unfailing power to move men. Communists are that part of mankind which has recovered the power to live or die--to bear witness--for its faith. And it is a simple, rational faith that inspires men to live or die for it.

It is not new. It is, in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: “Ye shall be as gods.” It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man’s relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God.

It is the vision of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man’s liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirected men’s destiny and reorganizing mand’s life and the world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure of the Creation, not because God made man in His image, but because man’s mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals. …

The vision is a challenge and implies a threat. It challenges man to prove by his acts that he is the masterwork of the Creation – by making thought and act one. It challenges him to prove it by using the force of his rational mind to end the bloody meaningless-ness of man’s history – by giving it purpose and a plan. It challenges him to prove it by reducing the meaningless chaos of nature, by imposing on it his rational will to order, abundance, security, peace. It is the vision of materialism.” 

 Equally instructive and relevant for our consideration today are Chambers’ words about communism’s insidious ability to attract good people.

He wrote, “I see in Communism the focus of the concentrated evil of our time.” So, he asked, why do men become Communists? How did he become one himself? Was it that he was “simply stupid?” “Morally depraved?” He answered “no” to both. “Educated men,” he said, “become Communists chiefly for moral reasons” even as they realize that “the crimes and horrors of Communism were inherent in Communism.”

He was one of the many to fall for its deceptive allure to the point that “this movement, once a mere muttering of political outcasts, became the immense force that now contests the mastery of mankind.” But, again, why? Answer: “Communism makes some profound appeal to the human mind.” It continued to attract converts even after its evils became common knowledge.

Chambers pointed out that Communism “is not simply a vicious plot hatched by wicked men in a sub-cellar. Nor is it just the writings of Marx and Lenin, or its many precepts, or the theatrical appeal of the many revolutionaries who chant, “Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to gain.”

“Communists,” wrote Chambers, “are bound together by no secret oath. The tie that binds them across the frontiers of nations, across the barriers of language and differences of class and education, in defiance of religion, morality, truth, law, honor, the weakness of the body and the irresolutions of the mind, even unto death, is a simple conviction. It is necessary to change the world.”

It is necessary to change the world. Kind of like, "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America."

I have long believed that liberalism flourishes largely by virtue of its superficial moral appeal and the faith of its adherents in the power of man, through the agency of government, to solve all man’s problems and to continue down the linear path to enlightenment and toward man’s perfection.

While I am not trying to be melodramatic or overstate the case, I do believe we can profit greatly from Chambers’ words. Our victory in the Cold War did not end the existential threats to this nation – and I’m not here referring to radical Islam, which can be discussed elsewhere. With the advent of the Tea Party protests I am encouraged that we’re finally waking up to these challenges and the reality that we have to remain more aggressively vigilant if we are to preserve our liberty and security. This is a promising start, but we must understand the struggle in which we’re engaged will never end as long as human beings are human beings.

In words that we should heed as a reminder and savor as an encouragement, Chambers poignantly related that he was not just a witness in a trial against Alger Hiss, but that he was also a witness in a larger sense – “an involuntary witness to God’s grace and to the fortifying power of faith,” that empowered him, “a man … tarnished by life, unprepossessing, not brave,” to “prevail so far against the powers of the world arrayed most solidly against him, to destroy him and defeat his truth.”

Ben Bernanke's plan to save the economy?  Print more money.  But what happens when the printer breaks?

Because of a problem with the presses, the federal government has shut down production of its flashy new $100 bills, and has quarantined more than 1 billion of them -- more than 10 percent of all existing U.S. cash -- in a vault in Fort Worth, Texas, reports CNBC.

"There is something drastically wrong here," one source told CNBC. "The frustration level is off the charts."

Officials with the Treasury and the Federal Reserve had touted the new bills' sophisticated security features that were 10 years in the making, including a 3-D security strip and a color-shifting image of a bell, designed to foil counterfeiters. But it turns out the bills are so high-tech that the presses can't handle the printing job.

More than 1 billion unusable bills have been printed. Some of the bills creased during production, creating a blank space on the paper, one official told CNBC. Because correctly printed bills are mixed in with the flawed ones, even the ones printed to the correct design specs can't be used until they 're sorted. It would take an estimated 20 to 30 years to weed out the defective bills by hand, but a mechanized system is expected to get the job done in about a year.

Smells like a Ron Paul stuxnet to me.

(h/t Laura Ingraham)

My Muslim Brotherhood threads gave rise to a bit of confusion about which book I was talking about. Obviously, I made a mistake in assuming that everyone on Ricochet was reading every word I write, 24 hours a day. Now that I think about it, that's more than a bit silly and self-involved. A beginner's mistake, really. Sorry, I'm learning on the job. On the bright side, I'm not the President of the United States.

Let me gather all those threads in one place, so we can get organized. 

Encounter Books: I Think I'm in Love With You and I'm Available on Saturday Night

Very Informal Poll: What Do You Know About the Muslim Brotherhood?

The Muslim Brotherhood: The Google Ban is Lifted

Andy McCarthy's Broadside and the New Ricochet Book Club

What I'm leading up to here is a plea for more awareness of the history and role of the Muslim Brotherhood. Al Qaeda is a household name, but most Americans are only dimly aware of the Brotherhood.

This makes no sense. It leads to national security and foreign policy absurdities--such as Obama inviting members of the Brotherhood to attend his 2009 al-Azhar speech in Cairo. These are true enemies of the West. They are as dangerous as al Qaeda if not more, and their reach is certainly wider. They have no business getting anywhere near an American president. 

Without understanding what they are and what they're after, you cannot properly understand what's going on in universities throughout the West: The words "Qaradawi is now a trustee at Oxford University's Centre for Islamic Studies" will not chill you to the quick, as they should. 

You will not understand why the IIIT network is hugely significant, or why the Malaysian government goes insane when the West fails to appreciate that opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim is not a martyr but an Islamist who played a key role in establishing this network. 

You will not grasp the significance of the presence of Muslim Brotherhood activists on the Mavi Marmara or why this link between the IHH and Turkey's AKP government should have the world on red alert. 

You will not be able to understand what has happened in Europe, or why figures such as Tariq Ramadan should meet with our deepest skepticism because of his ties to the Brotherhood:

What most European politicians fail to understand is that by meeting with radical organizations, they empower them and grant the Muslim Brotherhood legitimacy. There is an implied endorsement to any meeting, especially when the same politicians ignore moderate voices that do not have access to generous Saudi funding. This creates a self-perpetuating cycle of radicalization because the greater the political legitimacy of the Muslim Brotherhood, the more opportunity it and its proxy groups will have to influence and radicalize various European Muslim communities. The ultimate irony is that Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna dreamed of spreading Islamism throughout Egypt and the Muslim world. He would have never dreamed that his vision might also become a reality in Europe.

The Brotherhood is the key. Saudi financing has given it an almost unimaginable reach. And most Americans have no clue what it is, to the point of not even recognizing the name--an unawareness that is, as far as I can see, a national security emergency.

I have differences with McCarthy's approach and with the Team B-II approach. I think it's a terrible mistake to use the word "Islam" and "Islamism" interchangeably. (The term "Islamism" is also inadequate, but at least it suggests a distinction.)

McCarthy's entirely correct that Islamism is mainstream, rooted in Muslim scripture and favored by many prominent Islamic commentators. No one who knows anything about the subject would disagree.

But there is also significant dissent from this view in the Islamic world. Those who dissent from it are our friends and allies. Why on earth should we pronounce categorically, say, that "In Islam, homosexuality and adultery are capital offenses," if there are practicing Muslims who think otherwise? Are we truly saying that we're more qualified to interpret the Koran and all of its associated scholarship than Muslims who have come to another conclusion? Why would we shoot ourselves in the foot this way?

This isn't a mere semantic quibble. We are at war with several interpretation of Islam, not all of Islam. Those who adhere to the most dangerous interpretations of Islam are the world's foremost murderers of other Muslims. It's insane to say to Muslim victims of Islamism that in fact, Islam is monolithic and it endorses their persecutors' ideology.

And how far are we prepared to go in our willingness to declare our position on authentic Islamic theology--do we think the texts and scholars support the idea that the chain broke with the 12th Imam? How about the consecration of the number seven: Is that the true Islam or heterodoxy? Ata versus Hasan al-Basari--where do we stand on that? Asharism--that seem about theologically right to us?

Me, I'm staying out of the Koranic exegesis business. If you say you're a Muslim, as far as I'm concerned, you're a Muslim. If you say you can find scriptural and historic justification for a world view that allows you peacefully to co-exist with the West, that's good enough for me. The last thing I'm going to tell you is, "No, you've got it wrong, if you're a real Muslim you have to kill Jews." That's idiocy.

This is my main criticism of the Team B-II approach. But it shouldn't obscure the overwhelmingly important point: The exclusive focus on terrorism is, precisely as McCarthy puts it, myopic. Because yes, there's dissent from the extremist positions in the Islamic world, but there's a hell of a lot of support for them, too, and al Qaeda is, as he puts it, just the most crude and obvious form of the threat.

The Team B answer is to focus on the notion of Islamic law in our definition of "moderation." Moderates, they say, don't merely reject terrorism per se, they reject the entire notion of an Islamic law that takes precedence over secular law.

I'm absolutely agreed that focussing on the latest terrorist outrage du jour leads people to overlook the significance, for example, of massive Saudi donations to Georgetown University and to fail to understand what a sinister and insidious effect this is apt to have on the foremost feeder school for American diplomacy. It's also why the world overlooks developments that cannot lead to anything good in places such as Turkey and Malaysia.

But the words to focus on are not Islam and Sharia--they're Muslim Brotherhood and Saudi money. Those words give us a much more precise understanding of who, and what, are the problems. They suggest a much more coherent and targeted policy response.

I don't want anyone in the White House who can't answer the question I asked about the Muslim Brotherhood without resorting to Google.

I can afford to learn on the job. The president can't.  

A few thoughts on the tax deal - Rob beat me to it, so make sure you read his post below about the payroll tax. 

1. My friend Hugh Hewitt is apoplectic about the 2-year deal, but it seems to set up 2012 nicely. Vote for us to keep your taxes from rising. Vote for them and they’ll go up guaranteed: it’s baked right into the law. 

2. Hearing the President get that fussy, irritated tone when he describes the things he had to swallow to get on board, and all the good things he did tax-wise,  reminds you how ungracious he is towards his opposition. If you were the smartest guy in the room and had to go along with ignorant boob-skulled bitterclingers, you’d be annoyed too, I suppose.

3. Extending unemployment benefits may be a bad idea in the macro sense - it discourages people from seeking jobs, and encourages the acceptance of the long-term dole culture. True enough. You still see stories like 10,000 people turning out to apply for 1,000 jobs, though, so I’m not sure everyone who wants to work has been turned into Jim Royle. But politics is also about perception, and cutting off unemployment benefits while trying to keep tax cuts for the top earners makes for disastrous public narratives. Forget Scrooge: they’d all look like Mr. Potter in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Yes, I know: this is how they’ll be portrayed anyway. That’s what the left thinks. Let them. Their case is less impressive when the moderate middle looks at the last deal, and sees A) the GOP didn’t go full Grinch, and B) they got the President to admit that raising taxes costs jobs. Whether he believes it or not isn’t relevant; I think if he said today that raising taxes costs jobs, and lowering them tomorrow costs jobs, he’d be praised by Frank Rich as one of those Fitzgeraldian first-rate intellects capable of keeping two opposed ideas in his head simultaneously. In the end he came off as the guy who had to be pressured not to raise taxes - and who seemed quite annoyed by the entire affair.   I’ll take that. 

In science we have a saying: "Association is not causality." That said, do you find it plausible that the the following two headlines from today are purely coincidental?

Bush job approval rating higher than Obama's

White House Proposes Payroll-Tax Holiday

Whatever the cause, the fact that the president is proposing some sort of actual tax cut--not a highly conditional program or a refundable tax credit for non-taxpayers--is a good sign that we may yet avoid a second Great Depression. Sadly, robust economic growth will probably need to await Mr. Obama's retirement in 2013.

I give him credit for moving -- slowly -- in the right direction.  Had he proposed a payroll tax cut one year ago, when he took office, instead of that greasy useless pile called the American Renewal and Reinvestment Act, he'd be in much better political shape.  

From the Wall Street Journal:

Aides to President Barack Obama are proposing a one-year reduction in the payroll tax as part of negotiations with Congress on a broader package to stave off income-tax increases due to take effect next year.

Under the White House plan, the Social Security tax paid by workers would drop temporarily by 2 percentage points, to 4.2% from 6.2%, a person familiar with the proposal said. For a worker earning $40,000, the tax savings would be $800.

The proposal has not won the approval of congressional Democrats or Republicans. Its emergence in the broader tax negotiations is a sign that the White House is trying to break the logjam on those talks before the end of the year, when tax cuts signed into law by former President George W. Bush are due to expire.

White House officials proposed the cut as a way to stimulate the economy, said the person familiar with the talks. 

So, I'm giving this two cheers.  One cheer because it's a tax cut, and that's always a good thing.  And another cheer because, well, does it make me a bad person that I know this is killing him, and I like that?