The Bosque Boys

From the front page of today's New York Times:

"But in a much anticipated court filing, the [Obama] Justice Department argued that the president has the authority to detain terrorists there [i.e., Guantanamo Bay, Cuba] without criminal charges, much as the Bush administration had asserted. It provided a broad definition of those who can be held, which was not significantly different from the one used by the Bush administration."

Are there no truth commissions? Is the "Wheel" no longer in operation?

Two weeks ago I could NOT have picked Jim Cramer out of a police lineup. As it turns out, he has been an on-air personality for CNBC since 1996. Who knew?

On March 3, 2009, his name finally penetrated my consciousness. That was the day the White House press secretary "called out" Cramer in response to his criticism of the President. The day before, Cramer had asserted that the recently announced budget represented a "radical agenda," and he held the President responsible for wanton "destruction of wealth."

Two days later, Cramer issued a manifesto of defiance, promising to lead an army of millions in revolt against the the President's policies.

A few days after that, Jon Stewart, host of the Daily Show, picked up the White House line of attack and castigated Cramer as a hypocritical menace and presented a series of examples of his erroneous predictions over the years. The next day I finally put a face to the name, as I came across a YouTube of Stewart's five-minute-plus comic excoriation of the Mad Money man.

Thursday night, March 12, Cramer appeared as a guest on Stewart's program, where the host lambasted him mercilessly for crimes against the economy. The Charge? According to Stewart, Jim Cramer and CNBC, the cable financial news channel that draws approximately 300,000 viewers a night, bears major culpability for failing to warn us sufficiently that the stock market was risky.

Friday the cable feud was above-the-fold news. I watched or listened to news stories reporting and reacting to the confrontation from three different sources (NPR, the Newshour, and the CBS Evening News).

Every one of those news-and-analysis segments offered a straightforward account of the dramatic televised duel between Stewart and Cramer (with video highlights), fully embracing and amplifying the premise that Stewart raised a salient point worth public discussion: how could the business reporters fail so grievously in their duty to protect the public good?

Seriously? Jim Cramer and his ilk are to blame for our current economic difficulties? Stewart is the king of irony, but doesn't anyone but me find it completely absurd that we should try to pin blame on some loudmouth, whom most of us had never even heard of two weeks ago, who appears on a cable network that captures an audience equivalent to less than .001 percent of the U.S. population?

Perhaps most troubling, not one of these mainstream news agencies connected Cramer's sudden national scrutiny and notoriety to his dispute with the President. What about some context? If you just tuned in today, you would have thought this story somehow spontaneously generated itself somewhere in the vast wasteland of cable TV. The reports offered no inkling that that the White House had initiated the counter-attack on Cramer.

No journalist asked the obvious questions: how much does this slug-fest have to do with Cramer's high-profile attack on the President? What role did the White House play in all this? Is Stewart a surrogate for the Obama administration?

Am I off-base? Are these NOT basic questions? What is going on here?

Welcome to the Surreal World.

UPDATE: unfortunately, add Howard Kurtz to the list of oblivious mainstreamers. The best he can do is say that online reaction tended to split along partisan lines and quote (but not link) Mark Hemmingway's excellent piece on NRO (linked here)--which everyone should read.

Regarding my previous post predicting a long honeymoon for Barack Obama, Bob and Merrill points us to this WSJ analysis piece: "Obama's Poll Numbers Are Falling to Earth."

The Executive Summary:

The poll reaffirms that President Obama's public approval ratings, relative to his predecessors, are NOT abnormally high for this early stage in a new administration. In fact, they are just a tad on the low side compared to past honeymoon periods and DROPPING.

In the view of Douglass E. Schoen and Scott Rasmussen, the numbers also suggest that the President may well have stormy seas on his horizon. Why? He has publicly declared a mandate for action that most likely exceeds the expectations of many of the swing voters who cast ballots for him.

More alarming for the President, the ADD-plagued public is increasingly skittish about the economy--and, if I may infer, nearing the moment in which they no longer collectively remember the previous president and, therefore, are LESS susceptible to the current strategy of blaming Bush.

Who? Oh, yeah, yeah, right, that guy....

An Aside: this reminds me. I highly recommend Joel Stein's hilarious but penetrating column today: "the economic blame game." I continue to hail Stein as the most insightful funnyman-pundit on earth.

Back to the Honeymoon conversation.

Forget about these polls. They are virtually meaningless. A lot of this analysis is wishful thinking. The honeymoon is in stable condition.

Why do I keep saying that?

THREE REASONS.

1. Forget about the precedents. This honeymoon period, like the election that preceded it, is an event comparable to NO previous occurrence of its kind. All of those previous instances existed within the framework of a media ranging from hostile to skeptical to at least professionally objective. The word that best describes the current media dynamic: invested. In themselves, daily tracking numbers mean nothing. A serious downward trend generally takes a willing press corps to turn misgivings into a template.

If a president's popularity stalls, but journalists elect NOT to report it as the story, will the public ever hear it?

2. More insulation: if criticism does penetrate the mainstream aegis, dissenters face a second line of defense, the wrath of a whole host of presidential stalwarts in the broader entertainment media. John Stewart, SNL, and like-minded enforcers provide a snarky gauntlet for this administration, guarding his flank with powerful satiric artillery.

3. Another Obama advantage: compliant and loyal majorities in both houses of Congress. This development is not as unparalleled as the truly unique circumstance of his media shield--but, nevertheless, it offers the President additional cover against attack. Why? The opposition has no platform. There will be no committee hearings or splashy press conferences to embarrass this president. Aside from political junkies tuned into the overnight coverage on C-SPAN, who is going to hear the opposition's denunciations of the President?

The Clinton administration introduced us to the idea of the "Permanent Campaign," the Obama administration may well render the first "Permanent Public Love Fest" reality show.

Thursday, 12 March 2009

1. "Phony War." I failed to note on this blog the similarity between our current state of denial concerning our new economic reality to the so-called Phony War, the period between the fall of Poland in 1939 and the spring of 1940 in which the German blitzkrieg rambled across Western Europe. I meant to. Kudos to David Ignatius for making the connection in his Washington Post column today; it is a brilliant analogy. The Party may be Over (it really is), but the revelers refuse to notice.

2. Is the Honeymoon Over? In response to my definitive declaration a few weeks ago that the honeymoon for President Obama was still going strong and likely to continue for quite some time, Tocqueville has been sending me mainstream media pieces that take the President to task. Admittedly, the vehemence of some of the reportage and analysis over the past week surprises me.

Nevertheless, I am loath to admit that Tocqueville might be right (which would make me wrong). On Tuesday, in response to a tough op-ed at the hands of Howard Fineman, I wrote back to him:

Are you asserting that Obama is NOT still getting much better press than he deserves? I assume you are NOT asserting that he is getting anything comparable to the last president?

With all due respect to Howard Fineman, this president continues to get the most fawning press coverage I have ever witnessed in my thirty-five years of watching national politics.

Is the honeymoon over? Not by a long shot...

And after this big bounce on Wall Street, I expect his numbers to go back up five or ten points...

But even NPR ran a slightly combative, slightly apologetic piece today debunking some of Obama's numbers on education.

Actually, I razz NPR because I love them. Remember, NPR led the way among mainstreamers in reporting the success of the "surge" in Iraq, an inordinately awkward admission that most of the established news agencies could not bring themselves to make prior to the presidential election.

Now if SNL goes on the offensive, as opposed to limiting their targets to right-wing talk show hosts and obscure members of the minority in the House, then I might be forced to admit that the glaciers are actually melting.

One other serious indicator: I have also opined that the honeymoon won't be over until the White House press corps starts shouting questions at the President in a surly manner. However, after the last ten days, I can actually envision a moment in which the press might actually take on this President.

3. I support Geithner and Bernanke. One last thing. In my Geithner piece this week, I wondered if the treasury secretary might be sacrificed at some point to propitiate an angry mob incensed over the economy and the financial bailouts.

However, let me make it clear that I do expect something of an economic upswing at some point--and I like Geithner. While I am now convinced, unfortunately, that Obama does NOT comprehend the parameters of the economic crisis that confronts him, my thin reed of hope for something less than total ruin in the banking sector has always been Ben Bernanke. My sense is that the Fed Chair is the most knowledgeable government official (and the coolest hand) in Washington right now. This is a good thing. My sense is that he is capable of facing down the mob and the demagogues, maintaining his composure, and making the right moves. My sense also is that Tim Geithner is quiet but exceedingly competent in all this.

Remember, if you fix the banks, the recession comes around. This doesn't solve our malignant structural problem, but it keeps our gooses from getting cooked in the here and now. Therefore, I am fairly bullish on the possibility of a recovery over the course of the next two years.

I haven't had much good to say about the Obama administration, and do not anticipate much change in the future. So I better give an 'atta-boy when I can.

A few days ago I posted on the world challenges facing Obama, and how world leaders were testing him.

Apparently he has decided to show some resolve. We knew he had it in him after watching his conduct of the
campaign against the Clintons. After all, he's a Chicago pol.

U.S. Warships Head for South China Sea Link from Drudge.

UPDATE: The Chinese are now playing hardball. Today they are expressing doubt about buying more U.S. Treasuries. Coincidence. Not on your life. See my earlier post about the leverage we have given China with our debt.

Sometimes I hate being right.

In the quiet morning; there was much despair.
And in the hours that followed no one could repair:
That poor girl...rolled in on a sea of disaster;
rolled out on a mainline rail

The reign of John Maynard Keynes began with a titanic financial crash. Will the Keynesian Era conclude with another cataclysmic collision? Are we right now in the excruciatingly painful throes of passing from one economic epoch to the next?

A More Conventional History of the New Deal and the Great Depression.

From the very first moment I heard Amity Shlaes's provocative Forgotten Man thesis, I reacted to her revisionist assertion with skepticism and trepidation. I compliment her for ingeniously seizing upon an incontrovertible fact of American history: the New Deal failed to generate prosperity and, for eight long years, proved altogether incapable of lifting the United States out of the Great Depression. From that irrefutable, under-appreciated, and timely assertion, however, I fear that Shlaes went on to build a bridge too far, arguing that the New Deal actually exacerbated the Great Depression.

Not surprisingly, The Forgotten Man has set off a firestorm of accusations and recriminations between politicians, talking heads, and pundits. Perhaps most problematic, too much of the chatter seems ignorant of the conventional narrative of the New Deal. Submitted below is an ultra concise, straightforward, and hopefully noncontroversial summary of the events in question, followed by a few terse conclusions, several nagging questions, and a rant.

The Three Phases of the New Deal.

Franklin Roosevelt took office in March of 1933 in the midst of a horrific international financial crisis, which had been gaining steam since the fall of 1929. Although the national economy had showed intermittent signs of hope along the way, the winter of 1932-33 brought a culmination and fateful crossroads to the long downturn: an impending collapse of the banking system.

THE FIRST NEW DEAL. In the face of looming chaos and the potential unraveling of American society, Roosevelt and his "brain trust" acted with jarring alacrity and authority to seize control of the banking, industrial, and agricultural sectors of the American economy. Increasingly certain that the notion of the competitive marketplace had outlived its utility (and was, in fact, the cause of the massive crisis), the Roosevelt administration empowered the government to plan and coordinate the national economy.

During the storied first "Hundred Days" of the Roosevelt presidency, a special session of Congress gleefully agreed to a long list of administration proposals, beginning with emergency banking legislation. As an afterthought, they then added the Glass-Steagall Act, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and the SEC. Along with the rescue and reform of the financial sector, the President urged Congress to establish myriad "alphabet soup" agencies (NRA, PWA, FERA, AAA, TVA, etc.)--granting the New Dealers unprecedented authority to reshape the traditional relationship between government and business.

How utterly epochal was this moment? One commentator observed that this brief period read like the first chapter of Genesis ("and FDR created"), allowing us to imagine the new president moving across the great void and virtually speaking modern government into existence.

How well did it work?

Undeniably, Roosevelt's swift action after the bleak winter of chaos and confusion saved the banking system and staved off national ruin. Moreover, the regulatory regime constructed to manage the financial sector paid off handsomely over the next seventy-odd years--and continues to insulate us in important ways, even today, from a catastrophe strictly analogous to the 1930s.

On the other hand, the administration's expressed goals of dictating national standards for industrial output, prices, and working conditions proved less effective than originally advertised in terms of revitalizing the devastated economy. The initiative to impose production quotas on the agricultural sector raised commodity prices, but it also established the precedent of paying farmers not to farm, displaced legions of tenant families, and oversaw the intentional destruction of millions of edible farm animals during a moment of widespread hunger. And while the public works projects temporarily employed millions of workers, unemployment after two years of the Roosevelt administration remained astronomically high: just over 20 percent.

THE SECOND NEW DEAL. Although disappointed with his initial failure to hoist the economy from the depths of the Depression, FDR could console himself with his unparalleled popularity evidenced by the unprecedented reaffirmation of his party in the midterm elections of 1934. However, even in the midst of that electoral triumph, continuing hardship and charismatic potential rivals forced him to keep a wary eye to his political left.

What we now call the "Second New Deal" commenced in 1935, shifting administration priorities away from the frustratingly intractable business side of the recovery to a new emphasis on so-called economic security for American workers. Influenced by a diverse collection of voices (Keynes among them) acting independently but coalescing around a new economic spirit of the age, the Roosevelt administration shifted focus to the demand side of the economy. The new imperative: produce purchasing power among consumers by redistributing wealth and raising real wages.

Once again, compliant Democratic majorities on Capitol Hill proved happily responsive to the agenda of the president whom they now called the "Champ." Propitiating the populist vexation with the class of wealthy Americans FDR would soon be calling "economic royalists," the 74th Congress levied a confiscatory tax on large fortunes and corporate profits (the Revenue Act of 1935). The New Dealers also created the Rural Electrification Agency to bring electric power to isolated farm families, struck a decisive blow for unionization, collective bargaining, and higher wages with the Wagner Act, and finally found the right recipe for sustainable work relief (the Works Progress Administration).

Of course, the centerpiece of the Second New Deal, and the most concrete element of the Roosevelt legacy, was the Social Security Act of 1935, which created a massive national safety net for ordinary citizens and marked the beginning of the so-called American welfare state.

How successful was the Second New Deal?

In terms of solving the Great Depression, the new emphasis achieved modest success in temporarily blunting unemployment. The jobless rate dipped to 14 percent in 1936. However, as Roosevelt attempted to reduce the federal deficit by spending less on farm subsidies and work relief, just as the Social Security program introduced a payroll tax on most workers, the economy slowed dramatically and unemployment jumped back up to 20 percent by the end of 1937.

Significant to this narrative, the 1936 publication of John Maynard Keynes's revolutionary monograph challenged a basic economic principle of the day and influenced the New Dealers. Keynes postulated that government should intercept a downturn in the business cycle by injecting money into the economy and igniting and multiplying a "natural" recovery. The emerging theory encouraged the Roosevelt administration to push for more spending to combat the "slump of 1937," allocating billions to new work projects and renewed farm relief. After the intervention, the economy recovered relatively in 1938 to its 1936 levels.

"Keynesian economics" was not a revelation to Roosevelt in 1937; the British scholar had been a long-distance confidant of the administration almost from the beginning. Nevertheless, after two failed attempts at restructuring the economy, combined with Keynes's timely assertion of a systematic economic theology in 1936, the events of 1937 marked a dramatic tipping point for the administration. The slump and recovery hammered home an important lesson for Roosevelt and his advisers: in times of great distress, massive appropriation of federal dollars would stimulate the economy. After years of pragmatic experimentation with all manner of solutions, 1938 marks the moment when we can confidently characterize Roosevelt as "Keynesian."

On a deeper level, the Second New Deal also transformed American political culture. Our view of fair working conditions changed dramatically during the mid-1930s. Modern rules regarding child labor, the necessity of a minimum wage, and the forty-hour workweek are all products of the Roosevelt approach. More broadly, and perhaps most significantly, the Social Security Act institutionalized the notion that the government maintains ultimate responsibility for the welfare and economic security of individual citizens.

THE unofficial THIRD ACT OF THE NEW DEAL.

After four years of nearly unchecked executive power and his triumphant reelection in 1936, the "Champ" absorbed several debilitating blows during his second term. In addition to the inconvenient economic downturn in 1937, FDR audaciously challenged the Supreme Court. He came away with a split decision, losing the notorious "court-packing" fight in Congress--but succeeding in as much as he intimidated the surviving jurists just enough to save his Second New Deal from judicial nullification. More detrimental politically, FDR waged an unsuccessful campaign to cleanse his own ranks of non-believers. Frustrated with a less responsive 75th Congress, the President publicly entreated loyal Democrats to root out conservative obstructionists within the party, most of whom hailed from the South, and replace them with solution-oriented liberals. The midterm elections of 1938 failed to "purge" the renegade Democrats. The era of Roosevelt invincibility was over, and a long-running "post-1938" political impasse commenced.

With a loose coalition of southern Democrats and Republicans in Congress now thwarting the domestic initiatives of the White House, and the President increasingly intent on preparing the nation for the impending world war, the New Deal receded gradually from center stage. During the 1930s, the administration had happily exploited popular revulsion with the business community. During this third phase of the Roosevelt presidency, the "class warfare" rhetoric and other radical elements of the intoxicating early days of New Dealism gave way to a more mature relationship with the private sector. In essence, the war years necessitated a rapprochement between the federal government and big business.

Rehabilitated, chastened, and unleashed, American business thrilled a newly fascinated and supportive nation with stunning achievements in wartime manufacturing, full employment, and a skyrocketing GDP. Massive expenditures of federal funds resurrected traditional working sectors and created entirely new industrial communities built around war production. At the stubborn insistence of the administration, business finally submitted to the notion of unionization as a fait accompli and reluctantly accepted organized labor as a third partner in the retooled economy. Magically, business, labor, and government all prospered in this symbiotic commensalism as the nation came together to gird itself for a righteous war for freedom.

The government became a monster--albeit a generally benevolent one. The budget more than quintupled between 1940 and 1943 and continued to rise through 1945. Meanwhile, business and labor also emerged as popularly beloved institutions of American capitalism, as GDP more than doubled during the war and stood poised to ascend at an ever more astounding rate once the conflagration ceased. As the fight overseas raged on, even in the midst of rationing and scarcity, American workers and families enjoyed a level of prosperity unknown for more than a decade. Somewhere in the midst of the fog of war, the Great Depression evaporated into the atmosphere never to be heard from again.

What happened? What can we deduce from this set of facts?

As an experiment in Keynesian economics, it is currently popular to assert that the War experience proved that massive government spending defeated the Great Depression. While true on its face, that facile conclusion, especially when applied to our present situation, merely leads to more difficult questions.

How colossal would the massive stimulus actually need to be to redirect our failing economy? Crafting a current measure proportional to our wartime spending might require as much as five trillion dollars in stimulative appropriations ($5,000,000,000,000)--or one-third of our current GDP. Based on this calculation, many intellectuals castigate the most recent 800-billion-dollar stimulus as annoyingly insignificant.

Are you ready for a second stimulus? And a third? How about a fourth?

What brand of national emergency would precipitate such extraordinarily gargantuan intervention?

And, by the way, what role should defense spending play in this "inducement to investment"?

Even more troublesome, the contemporary full-blown Keynesian prescription also assumes that current conditions are relatively similar to the 1940s. That is, once we run up massive deficits to leverage our way into a spending-driven cycle of prosperity, we are well-positioned to expand ourselves back into the black (or close to it) as we did during the post-war decades. That is no modest assumption.

To be fair, our simplistic popular association that imagines Keynesian principles as a license to achieve permanent prosperity through perpetual government stimulus and massive public debts and deficits breaks faith with Keynes's General Theory. Keynes, who died in 1946, never posited that government could guarantee unlimited abundance. However, the fundamental flaw with the New Deal-slash-Keynesian hybrid lies with the misleading assurance that government can ensure life without misfortune. Keynes himself made no such promise.

Perpetual deficits and an out-sized national debt strikes me as an unsustainable proposition. Doesn't our profligate spending and inability to balance our budgets become an intractable problem at some juncture? Doesn't Mr. Keynes's magic carpet ride actually have to end someday?

Where are we now? The Rant:

Part of me wonders whether a Great Crash and a Second Great Depression is not, perversely, the only ultimate solution to our massive addiction to seventy years of unrestrained government intervention in the economy. I worry that our seventy-year Keynesian interlude must come to a close at some point in the near future regardless of what we do here.

For me, the question is hard crash or soft crash. My most sanguine hope is for a soft crash-landing in which we walk away chastened and repentant. Of course, that scenario stretches the limits of human nature. A more likely outcome is that we buy ourselves some extra time to further ignore our new reality and blithely go on with business as usual until we come to the next emergency. Why? We are addicted to stimulus. As a body politic, we have no tolerance for anything less than perennial expansion.

I am reminded of Thomas Jefferson's portentous observation regarding slavery during the Missouri Crisis of 1820:

"We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go."

Will it take a cataclysm on the scale of our enormously destructive Civil War to break our economic addiction?

The Keynesian episode reads alarmingly like a classic fable. Man is presented with a miraculous tool for good, if used in moderation. Instead of using the great gift sparingly, man happily abuses the new device until it is exhausted. If the fable has a happy ending, some benevolent force comes and puts the mechanism back in the box and instructs man that he will need to persevere without the gift. If the fable has a harder less therapeutic conclusion, then the largesse becomes the primary implement for destruction of man at his own hands.

End of Rant.

One last thought (just in case the world doesn't end):

As for the assertion that we are all socialists now, the history of the New Deal offers us important lessons in our current time of troubles. New Deal regulation arrived as a needed corrective to the barely regulated 1920s. Large elements of the regulatory apparatus proved constructive, and remnants of that regime survive as a lasting and positive legacy in the modern era. Moreover, this model for reform will prove instructive as we emerge from an extended period of deregulation.

On the other hand, the general attempts at central planning during the New Deal failed. While we make a huge mistake imbuing market forces with mystical omnipotence to solve all our human problems, we also err when we delude ourselves into believing the market is optional. The reality of the marketplace is relentless, omnipresent, and presents us with myriad contingencies impossible to anticipate.

Finally, it is worth noting that a more mature, less invasive, more business-friendly version of the New Deal proved better equipped at achieving a return to prosperity. In terms of recovery, Roosevelt accomplished more after he lost his ability to dictate policy to Congress and found himself forced to compromise the most radical tenets of the early Popular Front ethos. Class warfare and the tendency to demonize business proved politically expedient early on, but ultimate success on the macro level necessitated a more focused and less revolutionary approach.

Our current president might do well to note that oftentimes less is more.

My daily calendar tells me that today is Johnny Appleseed Day.

John Chapman (1774?-1845), aka Johnny Appleseed, is famous for planting apple trees along the American frontier in the Old Northwest, primarily in the Ohio River Valley. He subsisted by selling seedlings (at six cents each, if he could get it), or bartering them for food and clothing.

He also carried a religious message as he went. My calendar mistakenly identifies him as "evangelical" in spreading "biblical messages."

Chapman was a Swedenborgian, a religion that follwed the teachings/visions of Emmanuel Swedenborg (1668-1772), a Swedish scientist, engineer, and philospher. Swedenborg believed that God spoke to him through dreams and visions, showing him spiritual truths and the correct interpretation of the Bible. To quote from Encarta

Swedenborg maintained that in 1757 the last judgment occurred in his presence, that the Christian church as a spiritual entity came to an end, and that a new church, foretold as the New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation, was created by divine dispensation. According to Swedenborg, the natural world derives its reality from the existence of God, whose divinity became human in Jesus Christ. The highest purpose is to achieve conjunction with God through love and wisdom.

Many of the Romantics were influenced by Swedenborg's writings, including for a time William Blake.

A church was founded based on his teachings that continues today, though in its influence diminished since the nineteenth century, and split into two. The Swedenborgian Church and The New Church.

An interesting contest now in Connecticut between certain legislators and the Roman Catholic church and allies.

A Bill currently under consideration would mandate lay boards for Roman Catholic parish corporations, with the Archbishop or Bishop being an ex officio member without vote.

Full text of the bill here. Status here.

This Bill has provoked strong opposition from the Archdiocese of Hartford.

In a letter to parishioners the Archbishop wrote that the bill "directly attacks the Roman Catholic Church and our faith," because "[i]t forces a radical reorganization of the legal, financial, and administrative structure of our parishes" and "disconnects parishes from their Pastors and their Bishop."

Wizbang reports and responds to this bill, urging readers to contact the Bill's sponsors and give them what for. One of the links is to the Family Institute of Connecticut, a conservative political action group opposing the Bill.

On the one hand, the First Amendment, as it has been interpretted, would seem to forbid such government restructuring of a church. After all, the Roman Catholic Church is hiearchical, power and authority flows from the top down, not the bottom up. The Shepherds--pastors, bishops, archbishops, pope--are decision makers, not simply advisors or persuaders.

On the other hand, the state has the responsibility to establish adequate safeguards regarding legal corporations and their activities. The Church does not exist in a vacuum. Congregations, parishes, and denominations carry on activities that are covered by civil law.

If this Bill passes, I am sure it will be challenged in court. It will be interesting to see just where the courts would draw the line between necessary regulation of a non-profit corporation, and undue interference in the basic structure of a religion. My guess is that this Bill goes too far in giving power to laity in a religion that believes Christ established a hierarchy.

I move we make Pelosi the poster child for the 2010 Congressional campaigns.

Here's another reason she needs to be the target. From Wizbang.

Pelosi abuses power in securing military flights.

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment. H.G. Wells THE WAR OF THE WORLDS

To paraphrase Wells: across our own world, intellects ambitious and cool and unsympathetic, regard our nation with envious eyes, and slowly and surely draw their plans against us.

Their focus is on the President of the United States. Ruthless and ambitious men know the U.S. possesses great military and economic power. The question is whether or not we have the will to use it. And that question comes down to whether or not the President has the will to defend U.S. interests.

Eyes now are on Obama. How will he respond to challenges? The probing begins.

North Korea. and China. and Iran. and Taliban.