BeldarBlog

Be more worried about the amount of federal debt than who holds the debt instruments

Bruce Bartlett has a pretty well-balanced but simple article in Forbes online in which he attempts to answer this question: "Is America's foreign-owned national debt a threat to the U.S. economy?" I agree with both parts of what I understand to be his overall conclusion: The skyrocketing amount of the national debt is an enormous threat to the American economy and, indeed, to America's prosperity and way of life. But there is much less reason, and indeed not very much reason overall, to be concerned that foreign powers, including China, are so heavily invested in American debt securities.

Bartlett does a nice job of clarifying recent changes to both the gross size of the federal debt and the percentage that's foreign-owned — one upshot of which is that a surprising amount, indeed slightly more than half, of the debt instruments (chiefly long-term federal bonds) cumulatively representing that indebtedness are still owned domestically. He explains how China's concentration of ownership represents a deliberate decision by China's central government policymakers to artificially depress the Chinese yuan against the American dollar, which in turn makes Chinese exports relatively less expensive and imports to China relatively more.

As far as generally quantifying the risks of Chinese or other foreign ownership, Bartlett also briefly explains that if the Chinese, or any other large debt holder, were suddenly to dump their U.S. debt security holdings — to liquidate them in the proverbial "fire sale" through open-market transactions with the proverbial "willing buyer [at some price]" — that might well cause a rise in the interest rates America would have to pay on future borrowings. That rising interest rate would of course make our borrowing more expensive, and I don't mean to trivialize the potential damage from that.

The Chinese are probably not unhappy at the prospect that with their relatively safe investment comes some latent and theoretical political power. Sure, it's a plus for them to the extent that there are any scenarios in which they could damage U.S. economic interests. But as Bartlett also notes, those scenarios could only play out if the Chinese were willing to simultaneously absorb huge and probably irreplaceable losses to the principal of their main governmental investment of wealth.

Just how big the impact would be, and how few or many interest rate points would be added, would depend on the spread in the distress sale, along with the availability and eagerness of other buyers. For rational economic actors, interest rates correlate with risk; and unless (or at least until) there is huge structural damage to the American economy, the risk of the U.S. government defaulting on paying its bonds is still lower than that of any other government with remotely the borrowing capacity we have. Indeed, the willingness of the Chinese government, and of other foreign investors who aren't bound by political strings to the Chinese, to continue buying American debt instruments even with almost no interest (and sometimes with an effective negative yield to maturity) during the last couple of years reflects a "flight to quality" in the international investment community. All of this suggests that their are serious intrinsic self-limits to the power of even a meddlesome and spendthrift rival to run up the interest rates on our government debt.

No, the main reason the Chinese — and other foreign investors — have bought into U.S. debt securities so heavily is that they're still the safest and most conservative investment out there. If that changes, we've got big problems all right — but they're not problems limited to, or particularly caused by, the percentage of foreign ownership of our debt instruments.

I might quibble by arguing that Bartlett ignores one specific aspect of the nature of the risk, however. Specifically, in international finance, nation-state players may behave differently from the rational profit-maximizers in classical capitalist theory. We can't make the mistake of presuming that the Chinese will never act contrary to their objective economic self-interests; indeed, for an example of a government which does that routinely, one need look only to neighboring North Korea. There are lots of hypothetical scenarios under which the Chinese could plausibly be imagined to find adequate non-economic reasons to justify incurring those economic costs. And there are somewhat comparable examples in recent history. (Recall, for example, Middle Eastern oil producing companies' sacrifice of short-term profits during the oil embargoes of the 1970s.)

That the Chinese have some sort of power to influence the American economy isn't exclusively a function of their buying our debt instruments, however, but rather is an inevitable function of the sheer size of the other economic transactions going on between China and the rest of the world, most notably including us. If sufficiently motivated to abandon its own economic self-interests in the process, any country of major economic significance could, theoretically, find other ways to damage our economy that didn't involve debt instruments. We wouldn't be immune from rough treatment, in other words, even if we didn't borrow any money from any foreign countries.

In the process of explaining that China's use of its power would carry high costs, Bartlett or his editors stumbled very badly with this stinker of a sentence, however, and in the process omitted a fairly important point:

Further complicating the issue is the fact that the Chinese now own so many Treasury bonds that they are really in the position of being a company's largest shareholder.

Well, no, that's not at all right — not even if we indulge in the useful fiction that in this borrowing transaction, the U.S. government is functioning like a private company. And it's a mistake that feeds into an irrational and unfounded fear, specifically the fear that by buying up our Treasury bonds or other debt instruments, the Chinese might acquire a direct say in what our government does. Such fears ignore the fundamental difference between debt and equity.

A company's largest shareholder is not much at all like its largest bondholder. He who buys a company's bonds gets to stand at the front of the line, ahead of equity holders (like shareholders), if there's a forced liquidation of the company and a distribution of its net assets. But in exchange, the bond holder generally has to forfeit all rights to participate in the management of the company's business unless and until there's a default by the company on its promise to repay according to the terms of the bond. And the caselaw says that companies owe all sorts of fiduciary and other unwritten, vague, but powerful duties to shareholders, whereas companies own nothing more to their debt holders than the precise minimums to which the companies are specifically committed by explicit written contractual promises to the bondholders.

Indeed, federal debt securities don't even include the kinds of negative covenants and restrictions that encumber many private debt offerings. They're not much more than a minimal "IOU," and that sublime simplicity is a fundamental attribute of that kind of investment opportunity.

No matter how many Treasury bonds China buys, it can't somehow "convert" those into a right to cast votes in the U.S. Senate or to give instructions to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The holder of an American federal bond has a contractual right, enforceable against the U.S. government under its own laws and in its own courts, to repayment of principal and payment of interest on the exact terms specified in the bond. And that's all it has.

Viewed from another angle: The risks discussed above — that China or other current holders might "dump" their holdings, and that China or other potential future investors may refuse to buy without higher interest payments — are essentially built into the terms of the deal, but the trade-off for this kind of borrowing is that it comes without further strings attached. The bondholder may have to stand silent, grinding his teeth, while the borrower runs the business into the ground, but until there's a default, there's nothing the bondholder can do; unlike an aggregation of the shareholders sufficient to represent a majority, the bondholder has no right to replace the management, and hence the bondholder has only minimal and largely theoretical influence over that management. Until the bond's due date, so long as any required periodic interest is being paid, the bondholder's decision tree remains bleak and binary: Hold or sell.

You or I, or General Motors, can't get those kinds of favorable lending terms because we can't justify the same credit rating, in essence, that the U.S. government gets. Lenders want us to put up collateral; they want us to make all kinds of promises about what we will or won't do that might affect our ability to repay. The day may come when the U.S. government can no longer get such favorable terms, either. (Russia, which defaulted on its national debt just before the millennium, certainly can't.) But in assessing the risks — and the limits to the risks — of having foreign governments investing heavily in America's debt instruments, we ought take such comfort as we legitimately can in the fact that our national choices remain, for the present, mostly unconstrained despite the massive debt that Obama and his cronies have already gotten us into. There's already ample cause for concern, and indeed there is already more than ample cause for immediate change (e.g., a return to annual deficits measures increments of less than a quarter-trillion, just for a start). But don't panic, yet, about the Chinese in particular holding so many of our bonds. In any fair prioritization of our national problems, that one is neither one of the biggest nor the most urgent.

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UPDATE (Sat Mar 13 @ 9:45 a.m.): Veronique de Rugy at The Corner also discusses Bartlett's article, and has a useful chart. (H/t InstaPundit, who reprints the chart.)

Al Gore, from the standpoint of idiocy

Jonah Goldberg aptly mocks this sentence from Nobel Prize winner Man-Bear-Pig Al Gore in a global warming op-ed in today's NYT:

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.

Notes Goldberg (ellipsis his):

Surely, a claim is in trouble when you can swap out a phrase like "from the standpoint of governance" and helpfully replace it with "from the standpoint of Glaxar: Supreme Ruler of the Known Universe" or "from the standpoint of the Hale-Bopp Cult ...."

But what would you expect when reading the writings of a global warming fanatic whose college degree is not in any sort of science (much less weather-related science), but instead in journalism? What wise words do you expect on the subject of the "rule of law" from a law-school dropout, or on the subject of "human redemption" from someone who flunked out of divinity school?

Laughter may be somewhat redemptive, though — of sanity, if not of the soul. And Al Gore continues to be good for a laugh.

Iran, Obama, and the 1936 reoccupation of the Rhineland

(Fair warning: There is no humor in this post, not even of the snarky sort. I'm not in the mood to sugar-coat my conclusions, or to balance them with hopeful observations.)

Mark Steyn's latest at NRO is characteristically witty, except for its very unfunny thesis paragraph, which is characteristically astute. Given the timetables, and the Obama Administration's commitment to ineffective measures, and its refusal to take the increasingly stiff actions that would be necessary to effect regime change and nonproliferation in Iran, Steyn offers this grim but inescapable conclusion:

It is now certain that Tehran will get its nukes, and very soon. This is the biggest abdication of responsibility by the Western powers since the 1930s. It is far worse than Pakistan going nuclear, which, after all, was just another thing the CIA failed to see coming. In this case, the slow-motion nuclearization conducted in full view and through years of tortuous diplomatic charades and endlessly rescheduled looming deadlines is not just a victory for Iran but a decisive defeat for the United States. It confirms the Islamo-Sino-Russo-everybody-else diagnosis of Washington as a hollow superpower that no longer has the will or sense of purpose to enforce the global order.

I'm genuinely not sure that Obama would know, if he read that paragraph, to which 1930s events Steyn was alluding. For someone with degrees from such distinguished institutions, his knowledge of recent history is surprisingly spotty. He might or might not turn to his staff for an explanation, and if so, someone probably would have mentioned the appeasement of Hitler at Munich in September 1938 or (less aptly) the German invasion of Poland in September 1939.

That's yet not where we are in the comparison, though. The history being replayed today is that of March 7, 1936 — when Hitler and the Nazis remilitarized the Rhineland. And I've seen no indication whatsoever that our President's knowledge of 20th Century history includes a knowledge of that particular turning point of history.

Hitler's remilitarization of the Rhineland — in outright defiance of the Versailles and Locarno Treaties — was when the West had its last, best clear chance to stop Hitler and the Nazis, with the likely toppling of Hitler's government as a consequence, at a trivial military expense. All that was necessary was that France and Great Britain (chiefly the former, as the relevant neighbor) just barely flex their vastly superior military muscles — which, given Nazi treaty violations, they had an indisputable legal right to do. Indeed, the Germans were instructed to reverse course and retreat at even a display of military purpose and intent to oppose them on the part of the French. Instead, because France and Britain acquiesced in the treaty violations, Hitler promptly accelerated the conversion of his illegally reconstituted military into the fierce machine that brought us the Blitzkreig and subsequent Nazi occupation or domination of Europe.

In 2003, America and the rest of the world believed that Saddam was about to get nukes. We talked about "WMDs" to include chemical and biological weapons, both of which Iraq had already acquired and used. But the invasion and regime-change of Iraq was perceived by those of narrow insight to be almost exclusively about the nukes. What shocked most Americans the most was that the nukes weren't there. What shocked much of the rest of the world, including nuclear wannabe countries like Iran and Libya, the most was that the still-respected Iraqi army — one that had fought the Iranians to a bloody standstill in their 1980-1988 war, and that had at least survived the Gulf War — proceeded to fold like a house of cards in a hurricane under the American-British assault. Libya was scared straight as a direct and near immediate result, but Iran has, of course, continued to play provocateur — doing its best to make things difficult for us and the Iraqis while fast-tracking their own nuclear acquisition efforts.

(Me, I was one of those hawk troglodytes who still held that Saddam's near daily attempts to shoot down our pilots in the No-Fly Zone was ample reason enough to drive American tanks into the middle of Baghdad if that's what it took to knock his regime out of power. And for the last several years of this decade, I've been one of those troglodyte hawks who has the exact same reaction to Iran furnishing men, materiel (including IEDs), and support for the killing of American troops in Iraq. We have long had more than sufficient justification for whatever steps are required to change the regime in Tehran.)

Barack Obama and Joe Biden, among many other reckless and irresponsible Democrats, did their dead-level best to sabotage our continuing efforts in Iraq from 2003 onward. (Indeed, Biden's efforts go back to his opposition to the Gulf War, long before Obama was on anyone's radar.) In their and their Party's revised Democratic-orthodoxy of world history, the Iraq invasion to stop nuclear proliferation was the result of a deliberate lie by Bush. With Obama and Biden and Hillary at the helm, and with gutless lickspittles like Reid and Pelosi running Congress, there is no longer any serious fear on the part of America's potential and actual enemies (Iran is definitely in the latter camp) that there will be any similar American military intervention to prevent nuclear proliferation anywhere.

And so here we are in 2010, in the predicament Steyn has pinpointed. Iran will get its bomb before the reins of leadership in America can possibly be passed back to someone who could summon up the nation's will to stop that process, and by then the costs of restoring Iran to a non-nuclear status will have grown unfathomably greater.

Although the costs will be unfathomably greater, that does not make me think they are less likely ultimately to have to be paid anyway. I think exactly the opposite is true: Something awful is going to happen, something so bad that it does, in an instant, shock the United States out of its narcolepsy in the same manner that 12/7/41 and 9/11/01 did. Recall, again, that in the Iraq-Iran War, Iran sent battalion after battalion of teen-aged volunteers, some without even rifles, in human-wave assaults on Iraqi minefields and fixed defenses. The mullahs didn't hesitate to slaughter many tens of thousands of their teenage children when they lacked even a fraction of a chance of military success. We cannot expect them to "grow" and "mature" when they have the responsibilities of a nuclear power. We cannot expect them to be rational at all because they have a demonstrated history of irrationality and they are in the grips of an ideology that can be twisted to justify even the most extreme apocalyptic acts.

Barack Obama's feckless vacuum of an Iranian foreign policy will almost certainly lead directly to nuclear slaughter, and quite probably a slaughter of Israelis, Europeans, and yes, Americans. The ghosts of not just Chamberlain, but of Quisling and Arnold, will surely rejoice, for after he has let the Iranians get their Bomb, the name "Obama" will forever eclipse theirs as appeasers and traitors to their duty.

("Bush-43 didn't fix this during his term," my progressive friends will retort, and "What exactly would you have Obama do?" Well, friends, Bush bestirred the country sufficiently to depose the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam in Iraq, and to give each of those countries a democracy if they can keep it (with considerable investment of American blood and treasure toward those ends too). If American foreign policy were genuinely bipartisan and clear-eyed, instead of being methodically manipulated, month after month and year after year, for the most crass political purposes by Democrats, then we would not be nearly so war-weary, and we might instead be in the process of doing to Iran what JFK did to Cuba in October 1962: Enforcing a nuclear quarantine. Slow, strangling sanctions are a horrible idea; swift and aggressive ones, like blockading all gasoline imports and disabling Iran's own crucial but limited refinery capacity to suddenly paralyze their entire economy, will indeed hurt the Iranian people more than it hurts their corrupt and crazy leadership. But a sanction that is insufficient to prompt them to shake off their current government is, by definition, an inadequate sanction. (But cf. John Bolton's August 2009 WSJ op-ed; I'm proposing not merely the typical UN-debated import restrictions, but what would indeed be, and should be confidently and unrepentantly confirmed as, responding to Iran's repeated acts of war with our own acts that are indeed warfare.) There's no shortage, in fact, of things we can do, even though with each passing day there are fewer things that can be done at comparatively low risk. But there's no point in our arguing over the costs, risks, and rewards of potential measures. They're all moot, given the absence of a leader in the White House who will act instead of dither and self-justify.)

In proposal to raise Ronald McDonald's taxes, Katrina vanden Heuvel beclowns herself

At the ridiculously named "Post-Partisan" blog on the WaPo, we find the following passage attributed to Katrina vanden Heuvel, who's the editor, part-owner, and publisher of the left-wing magazine The Nation as well as being the most predictably and unintentionally hilarious talking head on ABC News' "This Week" (emphasis mine):

At the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, it takes just under thirty minutes of work for an average burger-flipper to earn enough to buy a Big Mac (average American price, $3.58) on his lunch break.

Startlingly, it would still take that burger-flipper 29 minutes to earn enough to buy a head of organic romaine lettuce ($3.49/head). Add tomato ($4.99/pound), sweet onion ($1.49/pound), and carrots ($2.49/bunch); skim milk ($2.99/half gallon), hardboiled egg ($3.69/dozen), and whole wheat bread ($3.49/loaf), and to purchase his shopping basket, he’d need to clock over three hours of work, not to mention the unpaid labor he’d have to devote to preparing those groceries into a food-pyramid-friendly meal....

As the prices above indicate, [the American obesity] epidemic is not to be blamed on eating habits themselves — or even on their families. It is simply far less expensive to feed a family from the Dollar Menu at McDonald’s than it is to prepare fresh, healthy choices.

Ms. vanden Heuvel goes on to explain that tax breaks are the reason that McDonald's can feed your family more cheaply than your family can feed itself with store-bought groceries: "In 2006, McDonald’s spent $1 million every day on advertising aimed at American children, legally a tax-deductible business expenditure and, in effect, a subsidy given to the golden arches by the American people."

Her solution: We need to raise taxes! For the good of the children!

(The WaPo webpage from which I've taken those quotes, by the way, rather conspicuously displayed "tax breaks" (i.e., advertisements, the costs of which are considered to be legitimate business expenses of the advertisers) for IBM and the U.S. representative of a trade group promoting French champagnes. I hit the refresh button a few times and saw, in rotation, similar tax breaks for Bank of America, Xerox, Boeing, Sprint, and New York University. Damn, I'll bet Dick Cheney personally designed those web pages! Obviously we need to tax all advertisers more heavily. But why stop there? Let's raise taxes on the WaPo, ABC (or its parent, Disney), and The Nation too, since they're the ones enabling these advertising write-offs!)

(And by the way: I'm very impressed with just how far McDonald's has been able to stretch that million-dollar-a-day tax write-off, especially given that its corporate revenues last year were $22.74 billion, or $62.3 million/day, with an annual profit of $4.55 billion, or $12.47 million/day. If the tax savings from that million-a-day advertising deduction have indeed permitted McDonald's to both sell their food at below grocery-store raw ingredient prices and still generate that magnitude of revenues and profits, then we need to let Ronald McDonald take over Obama's efforts at dealing with the federal budget. If we're going to have a clown in charge, let's pick one who's demonstrated some success!)

Of course, it's only in vanden-Heuvel-World® that McDonald's is cheaper than buying groceries and cooking them yourself. Indeed, Ms. vanden Heuvel's post effectively proves to those of us in the, ahem, Reality Based Community that she's neither fed a family at McDonald's nor fed a family a homemade meal from groceries she's purchased.

Here's a pair of clues, Katrina — no charge:

First, homemade meals from fresh ingredients cost less on a per-person and per-serving basis if, after you've had your healthy lunch, you refrain from throwing away the unused ingredients. Your computations come out quite differently if you'd merely recognize that your specified shopping basket can make more than one meal. Perhaps en route to your summa cum laude degree from Princeton, Katrina, you should have taken a detour to study basic home economics. (Or you could have asked one of your servants. Or even the intern you sent out to an overpriced Upper West Side Manhattan grocery to gather that list of prices, but only if he/she is actually living off the minimum wage you're probably paying, which the more I think about it seems pretty unlikely.)

Second, when you take your whole family to McDonald's, it costs more than one dollar even if you all order from the "Dollar Menu," and almost no one (much less an entire family) only orders a single Big Mac. (The "Dollar Menu," in my own considerable experience and observation at Mickey D's, is mostly used for adding an additional side item by those who would've felt too guilty following their initial instinct to super-size their Value Meal.) Suffice it to say that I've never gotten my four kids and myself out of McDonald's without breaking a second twenty-dollar bill.

When you're completely out of touch with reality, then raising taxes makes marvelous sense as the solution to every problem, real or imagined, doesn't it? Personal responsibility? Individual liberty? How can we possibly afford those things, when groceries are so damned much more expensive than McDonald's food?

Blame where due

Of course, it's entirely George W. Bush's fault that Chicago didn't get the 2016 Olympic Games.

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UPDATE (Fri Oct 2 @ 12:32 p.m.): I wrote the one-sentence post above as a joke, based just on reading a news headline on my Blackberry over lunch. But when I turned to the New York Times' report on the International Olympic Committee's decision — which reportedly left the U.S. bidders "stunned" and refusing comment, Chicago having been considered "a favorite" and certainly unlikely to be eliminated in the first round of voting — I found that our chattering classes are already hard at work laying the groundwork for the finger-pointing that I thought would be only parody (italics mine):

The 10-person Chicago bid team, led by the president and Mrs. Obama, put on a presentation heavy on emotion and visual images without getting too deep into he details of the bid.

“To host athletes and visitors from every corner of the globe is a high honor and a great responsibility,” Mr. Obama whose Chicago home is a short walk from the prospective Olympic Stadium. “And America is ready and eager to assume that sacred trust.”

In the official question-and-answer session following the Chicago presentation, Syed Shahid Ali, an I.O.C. member from Pakistan, asked the toughest question. He wondered how smooth it would be for foreigners to enter the United States for the Games because doing so can sometimes, he said, be “a rather harrowing experience.”

Mrs. Obama tapped the bid leader Patrick G. Ryan, so Mr. Obama could field that question.

“One of the legacies I want to see is a reminder that America at its best is open to the world,” he said, before adding that the White House and State Department would make sure that all visitors would feel welcome.

And from the Chicago Tribune's telling of the same tale (italics again mine):

The city's presentation ended at 2:52 a.m., with President Obama answering a final question from the floor.

The question: Sometimes foreigners entering the United states can go through a rather harrowing experience. With the influx of so many thousands of people during the Games period, how do you intend to deal with this?

Obama responded: "One of the legacies I want to see is a reminder that America at its best is open to the world."

He pledged the "full force of the White House and the State Department to make sure not only that these are successful Games but that visitors all around the world will feel welcome and will come away with a sense of the incredible diversity of the American people."

Perhaps with the Bush administration in mind, he added: "One of the legacies, I think, of this Olympic games in Chicago would be a restoration of that understanding of what the United States is all about and the United States' recognition of how we are linked to the world."

Yes, in the Gospel According to Barack, all in America before The One was darkness and evil, but now all is hopey-changitudinous goodness. Even direct intervention by The One Himself wasn't enough to overcome the lingering poison of Boooooosh!

From the first NYT article quoted above, however, we can find an entirely sufficient factual rebuttal to this particular "Blame Dubya" argument: "New York’s bid was eliminated in the second round of voting for the 2012 Olympics." Even in 2005, then — post 9/11, with Dubya still at the helm nationally, and with both Hillary Clinton and Michael Bloomberg leading the presentation — the U.S. fared better in the I.O.C.'s deliberations, at least making it to the second round of voting.

UPDATE (Sat Oct 3 @ 7:45 a.m.): One of Rich Lowry's email correspondents complied a fabulous "Top Ten" list of reasons why Chicago didn't get the Olympics, and guess what's Number One? Elsewhere, InstaPundit links Dana Loesch, who links CMR.com quoting disgraced U.S. Senator Roland Buris as saying "that the image of the U. S. has been so tarnished in the last 8 years that, even Barack Obama making an unprecedented pitch for the games could not overcome the hatred the world has for us as a result of George Bush." Examiner.com also attributed the same statements to Burris, but someone on Burris' staff had the good sense to scrub the Bush-blaming from his official press release congratulating Rio de Janeiro for winning the competition. (Jokingly or not, the WaPo's Dana Milbank in turn blames ... Burris!)

In the Obama Administration, closing "Guantanamo was everyone's part-time job"

If you need another reason to question the Obama Administration's basic ability to provide the single most important function of the federal government — keeping America safe from foreign enemies — read this WaPo story.

The Spin

True to form, the WaPo's writers and editors carefully withhold the screamingly obvious judgment that drips from the facts they report, and indeed, they try hard to spin things in a pro-Obama way. Thus, the article starts with a gentle bit of chin-rubbing:

With four months left to meet its self-imposed deadline for closing the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Obama administration is working to recover from missteps that have put officials behind schedule and left them struggling to win the cooperation of Congress.

Mere "missteps" — does that kind of imply something mild, like an uneven sidewalks problem? Well, back in WW2, the good soldiers of the American military came up with an acronym for the kinds of "missteps" described in the WaPo article: "Let's recover from this situation," our soldiers would say very politely, "because at present, the situation is FUBAR'd." In this exact same sense, the Battle of the Bulge was a "misstep."

The facts reported by the WaPo go on to show that when the White House senior officials acknowledge that they're "behind schedule" on closing down Gitmo, that's actually a nice euphemism for "everything's totally screwed up and there is no actual 'schedule,' just a ridiculous, arbitrary deadline that's going to be missed and that may never be met at all, ever."

And as for the "struggle for cooperation" with Congress — wouldn't "struggle" imply something whose outcome was at least close? Readers have to dig down to paragraph 24 to be reminded that "in May, the Senate decided, by an overwhelming vote of 90 to 6, to block funding for shutting Guantanamo Bay — Obama's first major legislative setback as president."

The Fall Guy Goes Under the Great Bus of State

The WaPo gamely repeats — without comment or the Bronx cheers it actually deserves — White House counsel Gregory B. Craig's insistence that

some of his early assumptions were based on miscalculations, in part because Bush administration officials and senior Republicans in Congress had spoken publicly about closing the facility. "I thought there was, in fact, and I may have been wrong, a broad consensus about the importance to our national security objectives to close Guantanamo and how keeping Guantanamo open actually did damage to our national security objectives," he said.

Got that? Dubya is responsible both for creating all problems and for misleading the poor Obamites into thinking that they'd be easy to solve. But nothing — nothing — is ever the fault of The One and his minions, at least not to hear them tell it.

But despite the fact that this and all other evils are obviously all Dubya's fault, lest someone else — like, uh, everyone else in America who's not part of the First Family or the White House staff — become interested in assigning responsibility for events subsequent to January 20, 2009, the good angels of the Obama Administration have demonstrated, once again, that they do know very well how to throw one of their own under the wheels of the bus:

Craig oversaw the drafting of the executive order that set Jan. 22, 2010, as the date by which the prison must be closed.

"It seemed like a bold move at the time, to lay out a time frame that to us seemed sufficient to meet the goal," one senior official said. "In retrospect, it invited a fight with the Hill and left us constantly looking at the clock."

"The entire civil service counseled him not to set a deadline" to close Guantanamo, according to one senior government lawyer.

Thus Craig is clearly being set up — with or without his consent, and it's quite possible that he's been importuned to fall on his sword and is doing so willingly — as the fall guy. And where will he land?

Three administration officials said they expect Craig to leave his current post in the near future, and one said he is on the short list for a seat on the bench or a diplomatic position. Craig has long made clear his desire to be involved in foreign policy, but he declined to comment on his plans.

How likely is it that Roger Craig will be the next Ambassador to, say, China, the United Kingdom, or Bermuda? I'd say only slightly better than the odds that the Obama Administration will meet President Obama's own the outgoing White House counsel's own self-imposed deadline for closing Gitmo:

After the congressional setbacks, Craig orchestrated the release of four of the Uighurs, flying with them and a State Department official from Guantanamo Bay to Bermuda, a self-governing British territory whose international relations are administered by Britain.

The transfer produced a diplomatic rift. British and U.S. officials said the Obama administration gave Britain two hours' notice that the Uighurs were being sent to Bermuda. "They essentially snuck them in, and we were furious," said a senior British official.

The move also caused friction between Britain and China, which seeks the Uighurs for waging an insurgency against the Chinese government.

Still Holding Your Breath for Gitmo to Be Closed?

And so how close, then, did the Obama Administration come to meeting its goal before Mr. Craig became tire fodder for the Great Bus of State?

In coming weeks, officials say, they expect to complete the initial review of all the files of those held at Guantanamo Bay.

(Italics mine.)

The scariest part of all this is that these are facts revealed by the Washington Post. If the pro-Obama WaPo can't put any better face on what's going on inside the Obama Administration's prosecution of the Global War on Terror (whatever they've renamed it to this week), how much chaos must there really be behind the scenes?

My absolute favorite quote could be expanded beyond the Guantanamo Bay closure difficulties to describe the entire Obama Presidency to date:

"Guantanamo was everyone's part-time job," said a senior official, one of several interviewed for this article who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Amateurs. Incompetents. Ideologues. Full-time politicians turned half-wit government officials. Brilliant leftists who, confronted with the real world, are exposed as clueless idiots and children.

It's going to be a long time until January 2013. Will the millions of American voters who should have known better, but who were taken in by Obama's sham, have stopped thinking 'Wow!' by at least November 2012?

End legislative malpractice by amending the Constitution

From University of Tennessee constitutional law professor Glenn Reynolds, aka InstaPundit, an item with which I fiercely agree (ellipsis his):

DAVID POST: Should Lawmakers, Um, Read the Laws They’re Voting On?

Sounds like something you’d ask in a third-grade civics class. But an odd editorial in today’s Washington Post takes to task “a group of well-meaning professional activists — and, so far, over nearly 60,000 online petitioners” who have demanded that members of Congress sign a pledge “never to vote on any bill unless they have read every word of it.” While the activists “have a point,” the Post concedes, their “proposal would bring government to a standstill.”

That’s not a bug, it’s a feature ....

Every time I deal with a federal statute in the context of giving legal advice to a client — which is an utterly basic function of being a lawyer — I have to actually read and then understand the statute. My failure to do so would be malpractice per se — something absolutely indefensible, something never excusable under any circumstances. As soon as I admitted or it was otherwise proven that I didn’t read and understand the statute, the only question in a malpractice case would be the size of the damage award against me.

But if that’s an utterly basic function of being a lawyer who merely advises private clients on how the law may or may not apply, shouldn’t it be an even more basic function of a law-maker, a legislator, who creates the laws that apply to an entire country?

By no means am I saying that all legislators therefore must be lawyers. (They certainly already have staff lawyers to help them if they need or want such help.) But if an educated layman, with careful and close study, still can’t parse through the language of a bill and figure out what it does, and how it does what it does, then that says something awful and disqualifying about the legislator, the bill, or both.

A simple pledge, though, would be about as credible and enforceable as Obama’s promises that health care reform won’t add a single dime to the budget — which is to say, a cruel and illusory farce capable of taking in only the most simpleminded and naïve.

Accordingly: I would genuinely support a Constitutional amendment which required every Congressman and Senator, upon casting every vote, to swear under penalty of perjury — with existing perjury criminal penalties, PLUS instant disqualification from office — that he or she had read every word of everything he or she voted upon. Not just a summary (although they could read summaries too, if they chose) or a recommendation (again, fine as a supplement, but not as a replacement). Enforcement to be by a mechanism where 10% of either chamber’s members could indict and prosecute any member of either chamber for an alleged violation, trial to be held within 30 days on national TV, finder of fact to be a jury of 51 randomly selected voters (one from each state plus the District of Columbia), conviction and expulsion (without appeal) to be based on a simple majority vote.

For a bullet-proof practical defense — and indeed, perhaps even a prophylactic "safe harbor" provision written into the amendment or its enabling legislation to guard against unfair and untrue accusations — every legislator only needs a video camera to record him or her with an over-the-shoulder view of the text he or she is reading and the pages he or she is turning, perhaps with a side-shot of the notes he or she is taking too.  The videos can be posted on C-SPAN or YouTube along with congress.gov.

Note well: This is, and should be, a completely non-partisan "good government" issue. But I'm relatively sure which party's politicians would bitch and moan the loudest and fight the hardest.

Beldar summarizes Obama's health care address to Congress

Once upon a time — on a magic day when the calendars all said "Oh, nine! Oh, nine! Oh nine!" — King Canute rode on his Magic Pony down the aisle of the Wizards' Castle until he reached the pretty blue carpet at the bottom. Even though he wasn't at the seashore, when he climbed down from his pony, the waves and waves of applause made King Canute think he was. So he ordered the sea to cease its lapping at the shore, for its waves to stop rolling, and for the government operation of health care — through Medicare and through the King's "public-option plan," and through all the other ways that government has regulated and will regulate the rest of the health care industry — to be perfectly efficient and effective. Perfect! Yay! The Democrats all cheered and gave him many standing ovations to demonstrate their belief that indeed, the sea will soon go absolutely still, and our government will now and forever after do superbly that which no government before, including our own, has managed to do even adequately even for one day.

The King announced that henceforth, because he and his Magic Pony are very smart and will show us how, everyone can get more of everything, and everything will be better than it is now, but it will all cost less money than even just some of us are spending now. Brave, clever King Canute! No King will ever again have to worry about the sea moving, or about health care. Why didn't we make him the King way back when Good King Ronny was getting old? Oh yeah, now I 'member: It's 'cause King Canute was still doing cocaine back then, when he was just Prince Barry. It's good that he stopped that, and that he learned to think and speak so clearly now, especially about how to save money! Yay! Nobody is more believable than King Canute when he promises to save money and cut government spending!

King Canute said that there are "details still to be worked out" — drawing an appreciative laugh from the other politicians present, who sympathized with the King for his gigantic mistake of accidentally going off-script to tell the truth for a moment. But the TelePrompter of the United States regained control over the scene and the speech, and so there were no further accidental encounters with reality. Thank goodness for the TOTUS!

And the King's "public-option plan" will be especially clever, since it will be better and cheaper than everything the private companies offer ('cause the Magic Pony will pay all its expenses and won't take away any profits). But don't worry — the King promised that the public-option plan will only be available to those without insurance! Thus did the King solve the old problem of those who complain when others pee in the pool. Now surely only people who really feel the need to pee will decide to pee in the pool, and now surely no companies or individuals that are having trouble paying for insurance will decide to become "without insurance" so they can get into the government-subsidized public-option plan. Therefore, no one in the pool needs to worry about ever being touched by pee, nor to worry about the public-option plan turning into a government health-care monopoly with single-payer socialized medicine like they have in Merrie Olde Englande. "Whee whee whee!" shouted the happy Democrats, "Slippery slopes are fun!" ("Pee pee pee," muttered the grumpy Republicans, "We see where this is going.")

Thereupon King Canute did a happy dance to make everyone feel happy, and then he acknowledged the many cheers, and he remounted his Magic Pony and rode back up the aisle. Most of those on the right side of the aisle, and even a few of them on the left, noticed that the Magic Pony had left behind a steaming, fragrant gift on the pretty blue carpet. Most of them on the left thought the gift was dessert, so they gobbled it up while insisting that it was really, really yummy. But they saved a piece for you. Do you want it?

You know you're an SOB when ...

Funniest quote I've read in the Houston Chronicle in some time:

“It doesn't matter if you have a snowsuit on — if you're touching customers, they're touching you — they're a sexually oriented business,” Geffin told the judge. “You can call yourself a restaurant, you can call yourself an ice cream truck, but if your drawing card is topless dancers, you're an SOB, and you have to comply with the rules.”

Ice cream trucks actually do good business in Houston in August even without snowsuits or topless dancers. The tips may not quite match up, though.

Of course, this injunction hearing is all just another boring day at the office for State District Judge Randy Wilson. I'm reasonably sure he hasn't asked for the litigants to arrange a "premises view" on-site during business hours: The Harris County Civil District Courts' budget contains no money for dry-cleaning judicial robes to get the glitter and make-up off.

Assistant Harris County Attorney Geffin is probably right, of course. But trying to enforce these particular laws is like trying to bail the oceans using a tea-cup. (Or, perhaps, a DD-cup.) Although I've never been there, I'm told that this particular strip joint entertainment venue is outside the City of Houston, well away from churches, schools, or family neighborhoods, and indeed that it's quite literally out in the middle of the woods. One has to wonder whether the Sheriff and Harris County Attorneys don't have other, more (ahem) pressing matters to investigate and prosecute with their limited resources.

Thoughts on the death of Edward M. Kennedy (1932-2009)

I extend my condolences to the family and friends and partisans and allies and admirers of Sen. Edward M. ("Ted") Kennedy (D-MA) upon his passing.

Alas, my first two reactions to the news were not flattering to him, and indeed they are likely to annoy many of those to whom I've just extended my condolences.

My first thought (premised on Christian faith) was that Teddy Kennedy's four decades of dodging his proper responsibility for the death of Mary Jo Kopechne — however slight or (as I suspect) culpable that responsibility actually was — are finally over. May justice finally be done, whatever that may be, by Him to whom such final judgments are ultimately reserved.

My second thought involves a comparison with the current occupant of the executive mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — an address at which brother John famously lived, and to which father Joseph and brothers Joe Jr., Bobby, and Teddy all famously aspired.

Teddy's most serious run at the presidency, against Jimmy Carter in 1980, represented a deliberate and thoughtful rejection by a majority of the Democratic Party of a candidate who was all bi-coastal style and sizzle, a media favorite wrapped in romance and dynasty, but whose actual record was still then pitifully thin and whose character had already been repeatedly proven to be deeply flawed. One line from Teddy's convention speech — "For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die" — is still remembered over anything said by the Democrats' actual nominee from that campaign. And of course said nominee, the Dems' incumbent — who had already, in my judgment, become the worst American President of the 20th Century — went on to a well-deserved crushing defeat by Ronald Reagan.

Although it could still be prompted to go on the occasional drunken bender by that kind of vaguely poetic but ultimately content-free rhetoric from someone like him, however, as of 1980 the Democratic Party still had better sense than to entrust the country's fate to a shallow scoundrel like Teddy Kennedy, no matter how much that went against the media's romantic "Camelot restored" narrative and the fervent desires of the Hard/Angry Left. Yet by 2008 — their decency and sensibilities having been fatally compromised in the meantime by a serial liar and sexual predator who they also rallied to defend — the Dems had become utterly shameless, utterly irresponsible, and utterly besotted with another shallow but romantic scoundrel who had only a fraction of the governmental experience that even Ted Kennedy ca. 1980 could claim.

More than mourning the man who's just passed from the living, then, I mourn the passing of those times. Contrasting the Dems' rejection of Ted Kennedy in 1980 to their embrace of Barack Obama in 2008 makes me mourn the end of the time when the Democratic Party was a party of mostly grown-ups instead of mostly idolaters and haters, the time when as a party the Dems could soberly and seriously reject a glamorous media-hyped figure as its national candidate. I know not when or if we shall ever see the return of such responsible men and women to a position of power in the Democratic Party. (In the meantime, they'll be the few but perhaps vital minority of Democrats who are muttering to themselves, with entirely justified and increasing panic: "But nine trillion in deficits? Seriously?")