Girl of the Day - Okay, So This Is Just Gratuitous (Jayne Mansfield)

So sue me.

Syria On the Radar Screen?

Is Syria on America's radar screen yet?   A million protestors in the street, according to this article at least, and the government firing into the crowd, killing 17?   Do we care?  Or do we only care about freedom for Middle Eastern peoples when it's in the President's short-term political interest to care (Libya) and he thinks he can do the job on the cheap?   (Hasn't worked out that way in Libya, which is now in the fourth month of a non-war with a non-assassination assassination strategy, but still.... it was supposed to be easy and quick, which is how Obama appears to like things.)   

I'm Alarmed, Are You Alarmed? (The Real Federal Debt)

When we think of our personal finances, we ought to think, not just about what we legally owe, but what we would inevitably be obliged to pay.    That's our "real" debt.   I don't legally owe my children a college education, but I am saving for it as if it were a debt I will be obliged to pay.  

That's a concept that we need to keep in mind as we think about the federal government's debt.  The federal government debt is much in the news, but the federal government also has what is known as "agency debt" that isn't talked about as being part of the picture.   But it is, as Andrew Pollock at AEI shows:

Over the last four decades, the U.S. government has engaged in a financial experiment, or adventure, of exploding agency debt relative to Treasury securities.

The huge debt of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, other government-sponsored enterprises, and other off-budget government agencies (“agency debt”) fully relies on the credit of the United States. This means it by definition exposes the taxpayers to losses, but it is not accounted for as government debt. As the Federal Reserve carefully notes in its “Flow of Funds” report, non-budget agency and GSE debt is not “considered officially to be part of the total debt of the federal government.”

Not “considered officially,” as they say—but what is it really? It puts the federal budget at risk, subjecting it to uncertainty of defaults. It has proven its ability to generate huge losses for the taxpayers. In other words, it is really, if not “officially,” government debt.

The vast majority of agency debt goes to subsidized housing finance though Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Banks, and the FHA/Ginnie Mae combination. It represents off-balance sheet financing and hidden leverage for the government. Fannie and Freddie in particular have reasonably been characterized as “government SIVs,”  (“structured investment vehicles”) which failed, just as did the SIVs of Citibank and other bailed out banks.

In 1970, Treasury debt held by the public (“Treasury debt”) was $290 billion. Agency debt was small by comparison: it totaled only $44 billion.

But by 2006, at the height of the housing bubble, while Treasury debt was up to $4.9 trillion, agency debt had inflated to $6.5 trillion. Treasury debt had increased 17 times during these years, but agency debt had multiplied 148 times!

At the end of 2010, Treasury debt was $9.4 trillion, and agency debt was $7.5 trillion.

As I said, I'm alarmed.   Are you?

***

UPDATE:

Then, of course, there's Kevin Williamson's view of the federal debt:

The debt numbers start to get really hairy when you add in liabilities under Social Security and Medicare — in other words, when you account for the present value of those future payments in the same way that businesses have to account for the obligations they incur. Start with the entitlements and those numbers get run-for-the-hills ugly in a hurry: a combined $106 trillion in liabilities for Social Security and Medicare, or more than five times the total federal, state, and local debt we’ve totaled up so far. In real terms, what that means is that we’d need $106 trillion in real, investable capital, earning 6 percent a year, on hand, today, to meet the obligations we have under those entitlement programs. For perspective, that’s about twice the total private net worth of the United States. (A little more, in fact.)

Suffice it to say, we’re a bit short of that $106 trillion. In fact, we’re exactly $106 trillion short, since the total value of the Social Security “trust fund” is less than the value of the change you’ve got rattling around behind your couch cushions, its precise worth being: $0.00.

Be afraid.   Be very afraid.

Girl of the Day - Back to Your Regularly Scheduled Program (Rita Hayworth)

Enough with celebrities playing softball, give me some actual star-power!

There, that's better.

Girl of the Day - Last All-Star Celebrity Softball Version (Jenna Fischer)

The girl from "The Office."   I never got into the show (sort of like "Seinfeld" in that way... it just always seemed a little to self-consciously "hip" to me), but Jenna Fischer has some virtues:

Real baseball starts again tomorrow.   Go Cards!

Little League World Series

If you ever wonder where the teams that play in the Little League World Series come from, well I can tell you.   They start where our team starts -- as an All-Star team for a local league playing in a district-level tournament.   Our team, the North Central (Milwaukee) Little League All-Stars at the "Juniors" level (13-14 year olds), has advanced from "pool play" to a single-elimination tournament in "District 1," one of six districts in Wisconsin.   If we win three straight games on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, we advance to the state tournament.   From there we would go to a regional tournament, and, from there, to Williamsport, PA.

Well, that would sure be fun, but to do it we would have to win 13-15 games over the next four weeks or so against increasingly stiff competition.   We're an OK league, but we're not that good.

Still, I love coaching boys in baseball, and particularly love watching the Regular Son, who has been hitting the ball a ton in the tournament, and did a great job catching last night in a big win.   There's nothing quite so gratifying as watching your son play really well at a high level in baseball when it seems like only yesterday you were tossing the ball into his little glove from three feet away in the backyard and telling him to "squeeze it!"

They don't call it the National Pastime for nothing.   Anyway, that's why the Regular Guy hasn't blogged much the last three days.  

Girl of the Day - More Celebrity Softball Please! (Jennie Finch)

Jennie Finch actually is a world-class softball player, so this isn't entirely a gratuitous cheesecake post:

Not entirely anyway.  

Narcissus on the Potomac

Pete Wehner has a brilliant post on Commentary this morning on our President's seemingly boundless self-love:

At one point I thought it could be attributed to an unusual degree of cynicism, but now I wonder if it goes deeper than that. What I have in mind is President Obama’s obsession with portraying himself as our moral superior. Virtually every time he speaks these days, we are treated to another journey through what William Makepeace Thackeray aptly dubbed Vanity Fair.

For example, if you listened to the president’s news conference today, a theme we are by now wearily familiar with was repeated with numbing repetition: Obama, according to Obama, is quite simply better, much better, than those around him. He is a man of pure motives and unparalleled reasonableness, extraordinary intellectual depth, and unsurpassed seriousness. Others are driven by narrow self-interest, by the political calendar, by outside pressures. They are too ignorant or too weak to do the right thing, the good thing, the hard thing.

Not Obama.

Members of Congress, from both parties, are trapped by their own ideological predispositions. Obama, according to Obama, is not. He is free from bias, able to see reality whereas others merely see shadows. It is not easy to be Obama in a fallen world.

Politics tends to draw into its orbit people who are inordinately impressed with themselves and caught up in excessive self-love. But in Barack Obama we have stumbled across someone unlike anyone we have seen before. This is a man, after all, who believed he had it within his powers to heal the planet and reverse the ocean tides. And as the hopes and dreams of his 2008 campaign continue to crash down around him — as his popularity wanes, as some of his most worshipful followers turn from him, as he is  unable to extract himself from the results of his failed policies — his narcissism seems to grow, not diminish. It is hard to tell where this will all end. But I suspect it won’t be pretty. Watching what happens to those who fall in love with their own reflection rarely is.

There's something classically tragic about Obama just about now.   A man who has never been called to account, a man who therefore has never had to deal with public failure, a man who has been told practically since birth that he is the greatest thing since sliced bread... who are plebeians like John Boehner or Eric Cantor or Paul Ryan to challenge him?   None of them were editors of the Harvard Law Review, after all!*   Don't they know who Obama is?**

His fall, when it comes, as it inevitably will, promises to be very painful.  


* Cantor (George Washington, William & Mary Law), Boehner (Xavier), Ryan (Miami of Ohio).  

** This seems to be the mantra of liberal elitists like Obama, Kerry and Al Gore... "don't you know who I am?"

Birthday Today - Suzanne Vega

Suzanne Vega to me epitomizes a certain sad truth about the arts, and particularly the music industry:  for every superstar there are thousands upon thousands of wanna-bes who never make any money in music, but who squander some of the best years of their lives trying.   But, even sadder, to me anyway, are those who, like Vega, have a moment of fame in their youth and then are forgotten almost entirely.   Perhaps they are making good music still, perhaps even better music, but it goes largely unheard.  

Vega had one "hit" in "Luka" in 1987, an odd little folk tune about an abused child.   Why did such a song hit it big?  That's the question that I'm sure songwriters always ask themselves:  what is the magic ingredient to a pop song?  The instrumental hook?  The lyrics?  The subject matter?   The sound of the voice singing?  The arrangement?   Hard to say.   My son and I often talk about Bruce Springsteen ("often" actually doesn't begin to capture the level of the Regular Son's obsession with the Boss), and we have noted that even Springsteen had trouble identifying which of his songs would be hits, leaving "The Fever," "Pink Cadillac," "Because the Night," and "Fire" off his early albums.   (He also left off one of our favorites, a long song called "Thundercrack," but that one wouldn't have been a hit, it's just really cool.)

Anyway, Vega is my age, 52, today.   Here's "Luka" from way back when, back when I was a bartender and ne'er do well graduate student at Duke in English:

Girl of the Day - All-Star Break Edition (Kate Upton) and a Cardinals Mid-Season Update

The Cardinals are tied for first place in the NL Central at the All-Star break, which seems to bode well for them given the number of injuries they've had, and how poorly they've played at times compared to career norms.   Pujols had a terrible start and was on the 15-day DL; David Freese, our best third baseman, was out for six weeks; Holliday was on the DL; Schumaker, Punto, Craig have all been on the DL; Colby Rasmus, who I thought would have a breakout year, has gone into a deep slump and may get benched soon; the bullpen has been horrible and half of our relievers have been released or sent down; our starting pitching has been poor over the last month, etc.   And yet:  there we are in first place.   If Pujols becomes Pujols again (at least for the last three months he may be a Cardinal), and Berkman and Holliday can continue their fine seasons; and if the Cardinals' starters can hold up decently and LaRussa lets the new young bullpen arms do their thing (Salas, Sanchez, Boggs, Motte, Lynn, all of whom are young, power pitchers), I think the Cardinals pull away in the second half.

For now, it's the All-Star break, with the attendant festivities, including the celebrity softball game.   Apparently SI swimsuit model Kate Upton was playing.   That's wise marketing by MLB:

Accelerating Towards the Falls

We've all met people who seem to wallow in their own failures, who start down a path of failing, and then do things that are so self-destructive that it's almost as if they're actively trying to hasten their personal catastrophe.   Those kinds of people must at some point say to themselves: "Things are so bad, what does it matter if they get worse?"   And so the chronic gambler blows through the last of his life savings; or the alcoholic gets behind the wheel one more time; or the man who has been caught cheating on his wife and has sworn it will never happen again goes out and actively makes it happen again.   It's like they're in a canoe, drifting downstream toward a waterfall, and they're frantically paddling downstream trying to get there faster.  

Have we become a country of such self-destructive losers?   Well, you might think so.   Apparently Roger Kimball does, writing today the following:

There is no point in trying to imagine what a $1.5-trillion deficit means.  For most of us mortals, it is simply unimaginable.  All the more is a total federal debt of $14.3 trillion (and counting). And I haven’t even broached what I think of as the Williamson Warning (after Kevin Williamson, who gave prominence to the dour fact), namely that the real out-the-door, all-in price of U.S. debt is something closer to $130 trillion, a sum that, if you can bear to think about it, is Book-of-Revelations, Seventh-Seal, Four-Horsemen-of- the-Apocalypse scary.

Consider:  there are roughly 150 million workers in America.   A $1.5 trillion deficit means that our federal government borrowed $10,000 for every person in the American workforce!   In one year!  Where do they think that money will come from?   It can only come from those same workers, can't it?   And yet:  it can't.   American workers can't possibly generate that kind of extra wealth to pay off just this year's debt.   And what about next year's?   And the year after that?  

To paraphrase Scott Fitzgerald:   And so we beat on, boats borne along ceaselessly toward Niagara Falls.   Can't you hear the roaring downstream as the water crashes on the rocks?   I can.

Connect the Numbers

As I noted below, today the unemployment rate for June was released, and it was up 0.1% to 9.2%.   Not good, to say the least.    But it's likely worse than what's reported.... if the employment participation rate was as high today as it was in Jaunary 2009 -- meaning the percentage of the population who are in the job market -- then the unemployment rate would actually be 11.2%.   In other words, with a work force of approximately 150 million people, we've lost 2% -- 3 million or so -- who have simply left the work force.  

On the other hand, consider three other numbers:  (1) the minimum wage, which was $5.15 until July 24, 2007, ratcheted up over the next two years until it reached its current figure of $7.25 in July 2009; (2) federal  unemployment benefits are now extended to a maximum of 99 weeks, or nearly two years; and (3) the number of Americans on food stamps has increased 37% since January 2009.   Couple these with the federal mortgage assistance available, where homeowners behind on their mortgages can refinance, lower payments, lower interest rates, etc., and what have you got?   Simultaneously you have government programs which:

• reduce incentives for employers to hire new people (high minimum wage); and
• reduce incentives for the unemployed to accept new jobs, even at low wages (free food, help with housing, free money in unemployment insurance).

Now that's a bad equation:   Employers who don't want to hire plus employees who don't want to work.  Not too surprising that the unemployment figure has stayed high. 

Funemployment!   It's the new normal.  

Birthday Today - Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

It's Kevin Bacon's 53rd birthday today.   Let's see if we can play the "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" and get to the Regular Guy.   Here goes:

1. Kevin Bacon was in A Few Good Men with Kevin Pollack.
2. Kevin Pollack was in That Thing You Do directed by Tom Hanks.  
3.  Tom Hanks was in You've Got Mail with Michael Badalucco.
4.  Michael Badalucco was in the TV series "The Practice" produced by David Kelley
5.  David Kelley played hockey in college with Jimmy Farrell.
6.  Jimmy Farrell was one of the Regular Guy's best friends in college. 

See, it's amazing!

Here's one of Bacon's coolest scenes, from one of his first movies, Diner, where he plays a drunk college kid who's in the process of squandering his intellectual gifts (which hits close to home for me):

Chris Christie and the Politics of Clarity

Chris Christie is a clear thinker and a plain speaker, and it's working in New Jersey.   Here he is on the normally risible "Morning Joe" on MSNBC:




Not sure I can wait until 2016, Chris. Maybe you need to set your sights higher, now.

Girl of the Day - Krysten Ritter

Krysten Ritter played the girlfriend of Jesse Pinkman, the young partner of the meth-cooking ex-chemistry teacher, Walter White, on AMC's Breaking Bad.   Her character died in season 2, but hopefully she'll live on in flashbacks (as many of the characters on the show do):

9.2%

We have a tendency to think of politics as a game.  We want our "team" to win, and so we cheer errors by the other team that allow our team to score points.   Thus, when the unemployment data comes out, and shows that unemployment has increased under a President of the opposing party, we might have an initial impulse to feel good, since it makes our winning the next election more likely.   What's bad for him is good for us, in other words.

That's in the abstract, however, and we should always try to force ourselves to think outside of the abstract in politics.   Today, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly data showing an anemic 18,000 new jobs created, and the unemployment rate inching back upwards to 9.2%, that's not just bad for Barack Obama.   That's bad for us as Americans.   Those are real people, our neighbors, out of work, struggling to pay bills, perhaps losing their homes, with more stress in their marriages, fewer new clothes and toys for their kids, more depression, more crashed dreams.  

Our team is America.  Team USA.  Right now our coach, the President, is letting us down by calling plays (policies) that don't work.   Our team is losing.   There's still time to pull the game out, but we're late in the third quarter, and we'd better start switching things up soon.

Birthday Today - Ringo!

Want to feel old?   It's Ringo Starr's birthday, and he's turning 71!

Starr was obviously the fourth most important Beatle, but amazingly enough, he wrote and sang some pretty decent songs that have managed to last, which not a lot of people can say.   Here he is with his best song, "It Don't Come Easy," which it has long been rumored was co-written by his co-Beatle, George Harrison:

I Have Broadband Already, Can I Just Have the $7 Million in Cash?

Here is an article that encapsulates everything you need to know about Obama's stimulus plan:

In an important and eye-opening new paper, Jeffrey Eisenach and Kevin Caves of Navigant Economics, a consulting firm, recently examined ARRA’s subsidization of rural broadband. The ARRA stimulus funds for broadband constitute “the largest Federal subsidies ever provided for broadband construction in the U.S.” An explicit goal of the program was to extend broadband access to homes currently without it.

Eisenach and Caves looked at three areas that received stimulus funds, in the form of loans and direct grants, to expand broadband access in Southwestern Montana, Northwestern Kansas, and Northeastern Minnesota. The median household income in these areas is between $40,100 and $50,900.  The median home prices are between $94,400 and $189,000.

So how much did it cost per unserved household to get them broadband access?  A whopping $349,234, or many multiples of household income, and significantly more than the cost of a home itself.

Sadly, it’s actually worse than that. Take the Montana project. The area is not in any meaningful sense unserved or even underserved. As many as seven broadband providers, including wireless, operate in the area. Only 1.5% of all households in the region had no wireline access. And if you include 3G wireless, there were only seven households in the Montana region that could be considered without access. So the cost of extending access in the Montana case comes to about $7 million for each additional household served.

That's $7 million of our money wasted so that some rube up in rural Montana who probably went there to get away from things like the Internet can now have wireless Internet in his outhouse.  

But, but, but, the Keynesians will cry, injecting money into the economy is a good thing, no matter what we do with it!   That's why they call it stimulus, not because we buy anything useful with it, but because, when we waste it, the money goes out into the economy and starts circulating!  

Well, maybe, but consider:   wouldn't the money still be circulating if the government had purchased something useful with it?  Wouldn't the money still be circulating if the government had left it in the hands of taxpayers and let them spend it on things that they thought were useful?   For that matter, wouldn't the money still be circulating in the form of loans (to job creating entrepreneurs and small businssmen?) if, instead of the government borrowing it, the money had stayed with banks who could then make loans for real enterprises?

This is the myth of the Keynesians:  that money only circulates if the government spends it, and doesn't circulate if individuals make their own choices on how to spend it.

The stimulus was never about stimulating consumption by injecting money into the economy.   It was about stimulating government to grow ever more powerful as the dispenser of favors to favored constituencies.  

Girl of the Day - Eleanor Powell

I love the name Eleanor so much that I named my last daughter Eleanor Jane.   So, while Eleanor Powell may not be the greatest Hollywood beauty, she's got her name going for her and, oh, by the way, she's probably also the greatest female tap dancer ever.   Here she is with Fred Astaire in "Begin the Beguine":




I mean, really, holy cow!   That's really Entertainment!   Is there a Hollywood star today who has that kind of talent?   I don't think so.  

The Audacity of Hope and the Jewish Vote

Here are two stories that are obviously connected.   First, you have the story of the "flotilla" of activists bringing "humanitarian" aid to Gaza, which entails running a blockade set up by Israel to keep weapons and other potential terrorist supplies out of that territory.   The name of the boat trying to run the blockade:  The Audacity of Hope.   Ring a bell?   But, of course... it's the name of Barack Obama's campaign autobiography.   To draw the obvious conclusion:  the left-wing activists who support Palestinians against Israel are Obama supporters.  

Here's the second story:  apparently Obama is shedding supporters from the American Jewish community, supporters who heretofore have been staunch liberal democrats.   Where Democratic presidents can typically count on upwards of 75% of the Jewish vote, Obama is down to 56%.   Surprised?  I'm not.   Obama is the most anti-Israel (read:  anti-Semitic) President we've ever had, and his hard-left minions are openly pro-terrorist, at least with regard to the Palestinians.   American Jews are finally catching on.  

Girl of the Day - Elizabeth Taylor

An appealingly summery picture of Elizabeth Taylor as a relatively young actress.   Makes me want to have a picnic:

Mobsters

A story in the Milwaukee paper today about an attack last weekend should be shocking, but isn't:

Shaina Perry remembers the punch to her face, blood streaming from a cut over her eye, her backpack with her asthma inhaler, debit card and cellphone stolen, and then the laughter.

"They just said 'Oh, white girl bleeds a lot,' " said Perry, 22, who was attacked at Kilbourn Reservoir Park over the Fourth of July weekend.

Though Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn noted Tuesday that crime is colorblind, he called the Sunday night looting of a convenience store near the park and beatings of a group of people who had gone to the park disturbing, outrageous and barbaric.

Police would not go quite as far as others in connecting the events; Flynn said several youths "might" be involved in both.

"We're not going to let any group of individuals terrorize or bully any of our neighborhoods," Flynn said.

Perry was among several who were injured by a mob they said beat and robbed them and threw full beer bottles while making racial taunts. The injured people were white; the attackers were African-American, witnesses said.

Store video of the BP station at E. North Ave. and N. Humboldt Blvd. shows the business being ransacked. A clerk at BP confirmed to the Journal Sentinel that he was busy waiting on customers when one or two people held the door open to let others rush in and steal snacks and candy.

Not far away, 20 to 25 friends from Milwaukee's Riverwest neighborhood had gathered at the park shortly before midnight to watch some fireworks set off by a neighbor. In interviews with 11 people who said they were attacked or witnessed the attack, a larger group of youths appeared in another section of the park around midnight and were joined by more young people running up the park's stairs.

At some point the group of friends and the group of youths intersected; those interviewed said the attack appeared to be unprovoked.

I'll just say it:  "youths" without fathers around to tell them when to come home tend to get into this kind of trouble.   The problem is exacerbated by the ubiquitous presences of cell phones, which enables "organizing" a mob much more easily.   It's also exacerbated by the fact that "youths" don't have summer jobs, primarily, IMHO, because the idiotic Democrats set the minimum wage so high they might as well have called the bill the No Black Teenagers Shall Be Employed Act.   I think we'll see more of this sort of thing this summer, in Milwaukee, and elsewhere.

It's also getting tiresome to complain that, if the races of the mob and the victims were reversed, this would be a national news story, rather than a story where the local police don't appear to want to "connect the events."  

Birthdays Today - Sly

It's Sylvester Stallone's birthday.  At one point, Stallone was the Regular Son's favorite Hollywood star, and Rocky was his favorite movie.   He could have done worse.   Stallone famously sold his screenplay for Rocky for much less than he could have in order to ensure that he could also star in the movie.   I suspect that there are more than a few stars, like Stallone, who got their beginnings through sheer will and daring -- risk-taking, in other words, just like other entrepreneurs.   And, of course, they work in an industry where they are constantly judged on performance, fired (or not hired) for non-performance, and generally required to compete all the time for scarce roles.   Weird how so many of them then become liberals.  Stallone didn't, which is to his credit.

Here is a trailer hyping Stallone as the next Brando for his role in Rocky:





Oh, by the way, he's 65. Man, does that make me feel old.

Girl of the Day - Katy Perry

Not a big Katy Perry fan, but, I don't know, this works for me on the Fourth of July:

Mark Steyn Throws Some Cold Water on My Fourth of July

I've read Mark Steyn for a long time, and admire his mind and wit very much.  Steyn, a legal immigrant to America, loves the American idea of a self-reliant citizenry, but he also has his eyes open, and sees that our Obama-led devolution into Big, Bigger, Biggest Government and a dependent people has made the Founders' principles a dead letter.   Here he is, in an essay on NRO that throws a lot of cold water onto my Fourth of July holiday cheer:

Dozens of countries have “Independence Days.” November 25th, for example: Independence Day in Suriname. In that instance as in most others, the designation signifies nothing more than transfer of de jure sovereignty and de facto operational control from a distant European capital to a more local regime. 1975 in Suriname’s case. They had the first military coup seven years later.

But in America “Independence” seemed as much a statement about the character of a people as a designation of jurisdictional status. The first Americans were British subjects who had outgrown a British king as benign and enlightened as any ruler on the planet. They demanded “independence” not from foreign rulers of another ethnicity but from their own compatriots with whom they had a disagreement about the nature of government. Long before the Revolutionary War, small New England townships governed themselves to a degree no old England towns did. “Independence” is not about the replacement of a king in London with a president in Washington but about the republican virtues of a self-reliant citizenry free to exploit its own potential.

Please, no snickering. The self-reliant citizen? In the damning formulation of contemporary American vernacular, he’s history — as in over and done with, fuhgeddabouttim. What’s left of that founding vision on this less than Glorious Fourth of July 2011 in the Brokest Nation in History? “You go talk to your constituents,” President Obama taunted Republicans on Wednesday, “and ask them, are they willing to compromise their kids’ safety so that some corporate-jet owner continues to get a tax break?”

In the Republic of Brokistan, that’s the choice, is it? Give me safe kids or give me corporate jets! No corporate aviation without safe kiddification! In his bizarre press conference on Wednesday, Obama made no fewer than six references to corporate-jet owners. Just for the record, the tax break for corporate jets was part of the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009” — i.e., the stimulus. The Obama stimulus. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid stimulus. The Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Democratic-party stimulus that every single Republican House member and all but three Republican senators voted against. The Obama–Corporate Jet stimulus that some guy called Obama ostentatiously signed into law in Denver after jetting in to host an “economic forum.”

Charles Krauthammer did the math. If you eliminate the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Corporate Jet Tax Break, you would save so much dough that, after 5,000 years, you would have clawed back enough money to cover one year of Obama’s debt. Five thousand years is the year 7011. Boy, our kids’ll really be safe by then. I see some leftie at MSNBC has just been suspended for characterizing the president’s performance on Wednesday as that of a demotic synonym for the male reproductive organ. So I shall be more circumspect and say only that even being a hollow unprincipled demagogue requires a certain lightness of touch Obama can’t seem to find.

As they say, read the whole thing.  It's so sobering that I may need an extra gin and tonic or two just to get me through the weekend's fireworks. 

Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the Concept of Reasonable Doubt

Everyone knows by now that the case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the IMF, for raping a maid in the Sofitel, a swanky Manhattan hotel, has fallen apart.   The maid apparently was caught in numerous lies and had ties to drug traffickers and (perhaps) money laundering:

According to the two officials, the woman had a phone conversation with an incarcerated man within a day of her encounter with Mr. Strauss-Kahn in which she discussed the possible benefits of pursuing the charges against him. The conversation was recorded.

That man, the investigators learned, had been arrested on charges of possessing 400 pounds of marijuana. He is among a number of individuals who made multiple cash deposits, totaling around $100,000, into the woman’s bank account over the last two years. The deposits were made in Arizona, Georgia, New York and Pennsylvania.

The investigators also learned that she was paying hundreds of dollars every month in phone charges to five companies. The woman had insisted she had only one phone and said she knew nothing about the deposits except that they were made by a man she described as her fiancé and his friends.

In addition, one of the officials said, she told investigators that her application for asylum included mention of a previous rape, but there was no such account in the application. She also told them that she had been subjected to genital mutilation, but her account to the investigators differed from what was contained in the asylum application.

Let's be clear, however, about what this means and what it doesn't mean.   What it means is that the prosecutors, probably correctly, view the chance of gaining a conviction where the maid is the sole witness, as highly dubious, because her credibility as a witness will be so easily impeached.   They can't get to "beyond a reasonable doubt," the American standard for convicting anyone of a crime.   What it does not mean includes:

• That no rape occurred.   It is not disputed that Strauss-Kahn had sexual contact with the woman, and though he claims it was consensual, his conduct immediately afterward -- rushing to the airport to leave the country -- strongly suggests a guilty conscience.
• That Strauss-Kahn is anything other than a scoundrel.  Consider the best case scenario for him:  a powerful man, the head of the IMF and  a likely Presidential candidate in France, has "consensual" sex with an immigrant hotel maid minutes after encountering her.  Whatever you might say about that not being a crime -- and however "French" and "sophisticated" you may pretend to be -- in my book that marks him down as a disgusting old man.  Gentlemen simply don't behave that way; only fools and libertines do.   If he was the victim of a plot -- perhaps to blackmail him -- he was only victimized because he was an easy "mark," i.e., because he was the type of man who would fall for it.  I wouldn't want that type of man leading the IMF or leading a country, even if the country is France. 

So, while Strauss-Kahn may end up "innocent" before the law, that doesn't mean he needs to be treated as an "innocent" as a public figure, or allowed to behave as if he didn't behave scandalously.  He's not; and he did.   He's simply "not guilty." 

Girl of the Day - Blondie

Almost every day as I look for famous birthdays to write about, I come across a celebrity from the entertainment world whom I cannot believe is as old as they are.   Anyway, today is no exception:  Deborah Harry of the rock group Blondie is... wait for it... 66!

Here is a photo, from when she was at her peak.

And here is Blondie's biggest hit, "Call Me," from 1980, when the Regular Guy was a junior in college:

I Can't Resist

So Mark Halperin called Obama a "dick" on an unwatched and unwatchable morning MSNBC program.   And he gets suspended and is forced (in a Stalinist show-trial moment) to apologize?   But, meanwhile, stars in movies and TV programs likely owned by the same media conglomerate have for years called Republicans fascists and Nazis and imagined grisly deaths for George W. Bush or Dick Cheney, and that's all OK?  But calling Obama a "dick," which is mild on the average middle-school playground, is beyond the pale?   Go figure.  

Frankly, I think "dick" is both lame and tame.   I'd have gone all polysyllabic on the dude.

Here's the clip, in case you don't know what I'm talking about:

Minimum Wage Insanity

Economically, what America needs is jobs.   Culturally, what an America of cell phones and video games and texting and sexting needs more than anything is jobs for teenagers where they can learn how to work and behave in the adult world.   The Wall Street Journal today has an article that captures the insanity of our public policy in recent years, together with a chart that tells the story.   Here's the chart first: 

Jobs for America's older teenagers, ages 16-19, fluctuated and generally were trending downward, but really fell off the cliff in the late 2000s.   What happened?   The WSJ has the answer:

One of the first acts of the gone-but-not-forgotten Nancy Pelosi ascendancy was to raise the minimum wage in stages to $7.25 an hour in 2009 from $5.15 in 2007. Even liberals ought to understand that raising the cost of hiring the young and unskilled while employers are slashing payrolls is loopy economics.

Or maybe not. The Center for American Progress, often called the think tank for the Obama White House, recently recommended another increase to $8.25 an hour. Though the U.S. unemployment rate is 9.1%, the thinkers assert that a rising wage would "stimulate economic growth to the tune of 50,000 new jobs." So if the government orders employers to pay more to hire workers when they're already not hiring, they'll somehow hire more workers. By this logic, if we raised the minimum wage to $25 an hour we'd have full employment.

We're idiots if we think that employers will hire completely unskilled teenagers at $7.25 an hour.   That's $290 a week!   No teenager is going to be worth that when he or she is first starting.   But they need the work, and our civilization needs them to develop work habits.

Just as liberal elite environmentalism makes food cost more, which hurts the poor worldwide, the minimum wage doesn't affect the rich suburban kid (who isn't working anyway usually, or else gets an unpaid "internship"), but has a horrible effect on the poor black kid from the city who could really use a job for $3 or $4 an hour to bring home $120-$150 a week in the summer.

Once again, liberalism is shown to be hypocrisy to make white liberal elites feel good about themselves, while damaging the rest of us, and particularly the "underclasses" they supposedly say they're helping.  

VDH on Liberal Hypocrisy

Great stuff from Victor Davis Hanson, as usual:

We live in an age in which advocates do not believe in their own advocacy: A “planet is doomed” Al Gore refuses to fly economy; a statist John Kerry won’t pay taxes on his yacht unless he is caught; an anti-war Barack Obama won’t honor the War Powers Act he once deified; and the liberal congressional and media establishment will not put their children in the D.C. schools that are the reification of their own ideology.

In short, the generation that came of age in the 1960s succeeded in bringing to life the Frankenstein’s monster it designed in its own image — but suddenly it seems terrified of the very thing it created.