Or “tightened and scrubbed?”
Wonderful news from Pelosi: we’re now “pared” down to a lean mean $789 billion.
One of the many things that bother me about this stimulus bill and the earlier bailout bill is the sense of enormous rush. Haste makes waste, does it not? And the combination of “haste” and “Congress” makes for excessive waste.
Here’s an apologia for Obama’s first three weeks, from Ruth Marcus.
Her final question:
So if you’re feeling jittery about Obama’s start, ask yourself this: Is there another president in recent memory who would have done better?
It’s an interesting hypothetical. My answer: any previous president in recent memory would have done at least as well, and most would have done better.
Bill Clinton had a similar rocky start, but the country was not in a similar crisis. His early appointees were plagued with undeclared nannies (remember Zoe Baird?) and controversial legal articles (remember Loni Guinier?). He drew ire for beginning his presidency with the “don’t ask, don’t tell” issue of gays in the military, and his big health insurance initiative (headed by wife Hillary) fell with a resounding thud.
But Clinton seemed to learn from his experiences; perhaps Obama will, too. However, he has less time to do so, because of the magnitude of the problems facing him.
Carter struggled with Congress the first year of his presidency and never quite took hold. Maybe he should be placed in the category of “at least as well” as Obama; no better.
But all the rest would have done better. Has any president in recent memory showed the same combination of careless vetting of appointees, plus letting Congress have its way with a bill so important and far-reaching as the current stimulus bill? Has any been so relentless in panic-inducing gloom (with the possible exception of Carter?). Reagan, for example, came to office in a time of economic turmoil, but managed to get his programs implemented while remaining upbeat.
Congress is a huge part of the problem. The American people don’t trust Congress, and rightly so. Its approval rating is in the cellar, and has been for quite some time. So why does Obama? And why did he delegate the writing of the bill to the dreadful (and dreadfully unpopular) Pelosi?
The answer, I believe is leadership. Obama doesn’t have it, despite his rhetoric. And it’s very important—even vital—in times of crisis.
Over three years ago I wrote a post on the subject of leadership, and I’m going to quote something I said back then:
A leader has to give off an aura of trustworthiness and strength, and I don’t know exactly how that’s done. Eloquence can certainly be part of it, although it can also deceive. And of course, words have to reflect more than the aura of strength and trustworthiness, it has to be the real deal. When you listen to a recording of Roosevelt actually speaking those famous words “The only thing we have to fear is, fear itself!” you can hear his own buoyant optimism come through loud and clear in his voice, and it lifts you up. Like a good parent (or leader), he comforts and reassures when it’s needed the most.
It may seem as though I’m repeating myself, since I’ve written a great deal lately about Obama’s pessimism. But more and more it seems to be the key factor in what’s going on right now. This lack of leadership—the inability to convey the idea that there’s a firm hand on the helm—is a goodly part of the reason the markets continue jittery, despite all the bailouts.
Are we seeing the Cloward-Piven strategy in action?
If not, why is Obama accelerating his drive to stir up “fear itself?”
President Barack Obama used his first prime-time news conference to paint an extraordinarily bleak picture of America’s future if Congress fails to move quickly to pass stimulus legislation, warning that inaction “could turn a crisis into a catastrophe.”
He told Americans not yet suffering from the economic downturn that they could soon face the same fate as the down and out in Elkhart, Ind, a city he visited today as part of a campaign aimed at convincing Americans to press Congress to pass the recovery legislation.
Obama may not be especially consistent. But this is one topic on which he’s been exactly that, sounding a single depressing note from the very beginning of the financial crisis till the present time. Back on September 16, 2008, I wrote:
Obama’s response has not only been more partisan [than McCain’s], it is also more alarmist. Felix Salmon of Finance Blog compares and contrasts the candidates’ statements on the crisis, and Obama’s comes up short in more departments, including one area I had also noticed: Obama has publicly labeled it “the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression.”
So far it isn’t. But if Obama keeps talking like this, he might do his bit to contribute to its ultimately fitting that definition…Obama is reckless to speak as though a such a catastrophe has already occurred, drumming up fear rather than attempting to calm it through a realistic appraisal of what we are facing right now.
Of course, Obama supporters will say he was merely prescient.
…I just get a yen to look at some ugly dresses.
This particular bunch were featured at this year’s Grammys. Feast your eyes, and ponder how it was that these women came to choose these particular duds.
First up, Phoebe Price—and the Price isn’t right. Who is Price, you might ask? Her major claim to fame seems to be showing up in outrageous outfits at red carpet events. It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it, and Ms. Price seems up to the task:
But we’re just warming up. Next we have the supposedly multitalented M.I.A., an artist previously unknown to me. She’s pregnant here, but that doesn’t go very far towards explaining the following:
And lastly we have Bai Ling, an actress also previously unknown to me (that’s a fairly large set). The following dress would have been somewhat unattractive even without the bow. But that embellishment happily and resoundingly catapults it into the category of the deeply and spectacularly silly:
A study of identical twins and their wrinkles can tell us something about the aging process. Differences between such twins as they get older must be due to environmental causes.
The article linked above says researchers found a “surprising” relationship between weight and aging. I find it utterly unsurprising; anyone who notices such things would find it hard to miss, actually: before the age of forty, excess weight makes women look older. But after that point, it makes them look younger.
Well, duh. I’ve noticed this phenomenon time and again. My mother often remarked on it as she aged; among her friends, the principle seemed to hold true. My mother (aged ninety-five now) also has an oft-stated philosophy about the whole process: “As you get older, you can either be a thin old lady or a fat old lady.”
It was a short honeymoon after all. Short and not all that sweet, although the courtship seemed to promise a love for the ages.
It’s a subtle thing, since President Obama’s approval figures remain quite high. But support for his stimulus package is falling, and the uniformly positive press he’s used to receiving has taken a sour turn.
It’s the latter that must especially worry and frustrate him. Because he must know that the press was his matchmaker with the American public during the campaign, and if the press deserts him, the people may follow.
Ah, the campaign! It must seem like a thousand years ago to Obama, although it’s only been a few months. It wouldn’t be surprising if he were longing to return to the days when all he had to do was speak, and the love flowed.
And so Obama has decided to take his show on the road, since it’s not been playing as well as he’d hoped in DC. As the Telegraph’s Toby Harnden notes:
…[Obama] is returning to one thing in his political career that he has perfected—campaigning. In Elkhart, Indiana, today and Fort Myers, Florida, tomorrow, Mr Obama will try to seize back control of the political agenda with question-and-answer sessions with voters in two of the swing states that gave him victory.
Harnden also points out that Obama is now being perceived as passive, uncertain, and inexperienced;
But making decisions and operating the levers of power is something completely new to him. And it shows.
How could it be otherwise? These character traits were in evidence earlier, for anyone with eyes to see. In fact, it’s the sort of thing Hillary Clinton famously played on during her own campaign. But those in love with Obama weren’t interested in facing the possibility that, despite his glamour and glibness, she might indeed be correct.
Somehow, I can’t escape the feeling that Obama wants out.
Only this time it’s his staff. And they’ve only been in place two and a half weeks:
I’ve written about the theme of Obama and exhaustion before, here and here. It’s a theme that’s been coming up more and more lately.
Why? I think it’s because Obama lacks stamina, I think he’s exhausted from the campaign, and I think (along with Ann Althouse—see her comment at that link at 10:19 AM) that he’s frightened and is suddenly aware that he may be an example of the Peter Principle at work.
Well, so what? Who wouldn’t be both tired and scared at this point, facing what he’s facing?
The problem is that, just as there’s no crying in baseball, there’s no exhaustion or fear in the presidency. Oh, both may exist, all right. But it’s never a good idea to own up to either, because doing so undermines public trust, and creates a sense of doubt and panic. And that’s the last thing we need right now.
…as she gets older, Madonna is starting to resemble Mae West. Not physically, not really: Madonna is thin and wiry, Mae West was curvier. But both have made careers out of pushing the envelope of how much overt sexuality a woman is allowed in entertainment without being pornographic, although each operated in a different climate of what was previously acceptable.
One huge difference is that Mae West had a sense of humor.
It’s not been a real good week for The Lancet, the well-known medical journal based in London and New York.
Remember the famous Iraq casualty study, researched by one Gilbert Burnham of Johns Hopkins, and published in Lancet’s pages back in October of 2006? The one that found deaths far exceeding all previous estimates, and was quoted favorably by the antiwar crowd?
Now the American Association for Public Opinion Research has accused author Burnham of violating its code of ethics in failing to disclose his research methods, and Johns Hopkins is studying to see whether Burnham violated its research guidelines as well.
As for Burnham, he’s refusing to come clean, even now. Being secretive about such things is in and of itself a huge violation of standards: research must be transparent if it is to be considered valid, because it cannot be evaluated, tested, or perhaps replicated without this vital information. And Lancet is keeping mum as well about its role.
Now still another hugely influential piece of research originally published in Lancet has become exceedingly suspect. There is growing evidence that Andrew Wakefield, the man who popularized the idea that there is a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, and whose 1998 research caused a resultant drop in the number of parents willing to have their children immunized, fudged his results.
This sort of thing happens in research periodically, amd it is always a disgrace. It goes to the heart of trust in science and violates its most basic tenets. The special problem here is that both studies had a great hand in shaping public opinion on controversial and important topics, as well.
A widely-read and highly-respected periodical such as Lancet has a profound duty to subject its articles to proper peer review. In recent years it appears to be falling down badly on the job. Could it be that the periodical is more interested in circulation and stirring up controversy than promoting proper science?
[NOTE: I have previously discussed the misconceptions about the so-called “autism epidemic,” as well as the fears that keep parents from vaccinating their children, here and here.]
Just call him Cassandra.
Who? Harry Markopolos, that’s who, the man who tried to blow the whistle on Bernie Madoff for nine long years. But nobody heard—or, rather, nobody who was actually in a position to do anything heard him clearly enough.
Markopolos, an accountant and former investment manager from Boston, is having his moment in the sun, that long-awaited chance to say “I told you so.” Although it may give him some personal satisfaction to be vindicated, I doubt it does a whole lot to assuage the frustration he feels at having failed to stop Madoff’s Ponzi scheme before more people got taken in and more damage was done.
Markopolos says as much:
Why would people think I feel good about this?” Markopolos asked at one point in a series of recent interviews. “People think I’m a hero, but I didn’t stop him. He stopped himself.”
Over the past nine years, Markopolos sent detailed and multiple reports to the SEC pointing out red flags in Madoff’s fund operation, all to no avail. He could not get the New York office to understand what he was saying, and it was New York that had jurisdiction.
In an even more ironic note, the SEC head in Boston, Mike Garrity, was listening, understood, and told Markopolos that if he’d had oversight of the case “he would have had an inspection team inside Madoff’s operation the very next day.” But although Madoff’s investors were nation- and world-wide, Boston’s opinion didn’t count.
What was the problem in New York? Why did the top brass at the SEC there ignore what Markopolos colorfully describes as “the equivalent of Major League Baseball player batting .966 and no one suspecting a cheat?”
It’s hard to say for sure, since the former head of the New York SEC (she left the job for personal reasons before the Madoff scandal broke), Meaghan Cheung, seems to be forbidden at this point to say precisely what steps she followed in her investigation of the Madoff threat after she received a heads-up from Markopolos in 2005.
Markopolos thinks Cheung’s problem was that she was mathematically challenged:
In my conversations with her, I did not believe that she had the derivatives or mathematical background to understand the violation,” Markopolos wrote…
As for Markopolos’ reference to her supposed lack of mathematical acumen, Cheung said, “Investigations are conducted by lawyers and examiners and investigators. We have experts available to help us.”
Cheung is a lawyer, not an economist or an accountant or a financial expert. I don’t know how SEC investigations usually work. But if her investigation of Madoff did not involve her calling on the help of a very able accountant or accountants who were trained to detect fraud, then IMHO she would be guilty of gross negligence.
Yes, the math is complex. And yet Markopolos was able to do it. What’s more, Markopolos had given her “a map and a flashlight” to the problems, and yet she could not see them.
How did Markopolos come to believe so strongly in Madoff’s guilt? It was the math, stupid.
In 2000, Markopolos was the resident math whiz at Boston’s Rampart Investment Management when he was asked by his boss to figure out a way to match Madoff’s fabulous double-digit returns by figuring out how Madoff did it. But that proved much easier said than done:
“I’d say, ‘Hey Harry, how come you can’t run a program like this?,’ ” said Frank Casey, a former Rampart colleague who now runs a consulting firm for hedge fund investors.
For Markopolos, though, it was no joke. Again and again he could not simulate Madoff’s returns, using information he had gathered about Madoff’s trades in stocks and options. Madoff seemed to make money whether stock markets went up or down, a red flag to Markopolos.
“You can’t dominate all markets,” Markopolos said. “You have to have some losses.” Also, Madoff seemed unusually secretive, even to his own clients—another warning sign.
But although Markopolos saw the warning signs—and warned about them—it is curious that so few people understood what he was saying, or what to do about it. Markopolos seems to be an unusually tenacious sort of person, motivated by a sense of fairness and justice, as well as intellectual curiosity and excellent math chops. Unfortunately for him, the nation, and Madoff’s clients, these seem to be rare qualities.
The entire mess reminds me somewhat of the plight of Roger Boisjoly, the man who tried to warn of the problems with the space shuttle’s O-rings in the 80s, to no avail. The result? The Challenger explosion. Boisjoly has spent some time afterwards as a speaker on workplace ethics. Would that the New York SEC office had been on his engagement list.
Dr. Sanity, whose job regularly requires her to address clients’ risks of violence to self or others, offers some interesting thoughts on how to assess the risks of another terrorist attack.
Obama said it would be “inexcusable and irresponsible” if Congress doesn’t act immediately on his stimulus bill.
On the contrary. It’s “inexcusable and irresponsible” to rush it through without ascertaining whether its provisions are truly designed to stimulate the economy, and without eliminating the Democrat special-interest giveaways sandwiched in among the better proposals in the bill. The American people demand it, and a thoughtful approach requires it.