If a $100 million Medicaid payoff to her state wasn't enough to keep Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu bought for at least a few days, there truly is no honor among thieves. Landrieu bragged about her swag, calculating that the "Lousiana Purchase" was really worth $300 million.

The two other centrist Democrats whose votes were in doubt -- Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Ben Nelson of Nebraska -- took refuge in...]]> Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Oh, how the international community loves Barack Obama - loves to stiff him, play him along, and manipulate him. He's the world's celebrity ingenue, the slender naïf perpetually undone by the recalcitrance of foreign leaders.

Earlier this year, in a touching exercise in diplomatic and civilizational outreach, he sent two letters to Iran's mullahs and a new year's message to the Iranian people. How mannerly, how unthreatening. When the Iranian government beat protesters in the streets after it stole the election for Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June, Obama kept his criticism muted. How sensitive, how subtle.

In October, the Iranians agreed to send their low-enriched...]]> Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 On November 3, the fairy tale died. The election results in Virginia and New Jersey dismantled the self-satisfied, just-so story that Democrats have been telling themselves about last year's election.

The story goes like this: In 2008, Americans voted for change not just in the nation's leadership, but in its fundamental political orientation. They wanted a shift to the left not seen since 1932. The nation's political map had been utterly transformed. Barack Obama owned the suburbs and independents, and laid claim to formerly secure Republican states. An outdated GOP had been reduced to a rejectionist husk clinging to rural areas and the South.

A more modest rival...]]> Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 In his first year in office, Barack Obama has visited more foreign countries than any other president. He's touched ground in 16 countries, easily outpacing Bill Clinton (three) and George W. Bush (eleven). It's an itinerary befitting a "citizen of the world."

But there's one stop Obama won't make. He has begged off going to Berlin next week to attend ceremonies commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall. His schedule is reportedly too crowded. John F. Kennedy famously told Berliners, "Ich bin ein Berliner." On the 20th anniversary of the last century's most stirring triumph of freedom, Obama is telling them, "Ich bin beschäftigt" - i.e., I'm busy.

It doesn't have quite...]]> Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The Republican party has no national leaders. Its standing with voters is at an all-time low. It battens itself on an ideological purity that turns off the center and can't appeal to an increasingly suburban and diverse electorate. If it is not fated to go the way of the Federalists or the Whigs, it is certainly a spent force.

This is the rote obituary for the GOP that the Left can't resist. It is all the more alluring for its elements of truth. A party that holds neither the presidency, the House, nor the Senate won't be stacked with national leaders. In polls, the GOP is still suffering from its Bush-DeLay hangover.

Yet, in Virginia this year, this death notice has been...]]> Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The public option is back. Its Lazarus act is hailed as a sign of how rosy the health- care debate looks for Democrats.

August is but a sepia-tinged memory. Passage of a sweeping bill is now considered a lock by the wisest Beltway pundits. And legislation may even include the most shining prize of all, the public option that liberals -- no matter what the talking points for public consumption -- consider a way station to the Valhalla of a government-controlled system.

The flush on ObamaCare's cheeks, though, is not necessarily a sign of health. The return of the public option speaks to a key -- perhaps decisive -- substantive weakness in the legislation. It's no accident...]]> Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Republicans needn't trouble themselves to nominate a presidential candidate in 2012. No matter what, Pres. Barack Obama will be running against George W. Bush.

Bush will be Obama's eternal foil. At this rate, when Obama writes his post-presidential memoir, it will be titled: An Audacious Presidency, or How I Saved America from That Bastard Bush. His presidential library will have a special fright-house wing devoted to Bush's misrule. He will mutter in his senescence about 43, like the Ancient Mariner about his albatross.

Obama clearly wants Bush to be the Hoover to his FDR. Since his predecessor left office with 34 percent job approval, Obama understandably feels moved to...]]> Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 If only the laws of the universe didn't make it impossible to conjure something out of nothing. In a magical world free of such encumbrances, Democrats would be spared the bother of hiding the inevitable costs of Obamacare.

The latest gambit of Democrats in the Senate and perhaps in the House is to take roughly $250 billion out of health-care reform - for Medicare payments to doctors - and spend it in a separate bill. This instantly makes Obamacare appear cheaper, although its impact on the federal budget will be precisely the same. This isn't even competent three-card monte. It's the logic of the spendthrift who has maxed out on his Visa and MasterCard but thinks it's frugal to...]]> Sat, 10 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Last Updated: 3:48 AM, October 10, 2009

Posted: 12:21 AM, October 10, 2009

The Nobel committee may have chosen President Obama as the Peace Prize winner because of its hopes for his impact on the world -- but his top achievement so far has come at home. Indeed, Obama has been on...]]> Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 A buzz-generating Saturday Night Live skit mocked Pres. Barack Obama for not yet having accomplished anything. Not fair. Obama has been on a roll.

In nine months, he has breathed life into the Republican party, boosted pro-lifers, tarnished the reputation of regulation, bolstered traditional values, increased the public's desire for immigration restriction, and shifted independent voters rightward. If only RNC chairman Michael Steele were so deadly effective.

No, Obama hasn't, as once promised, turned back the oceans. Maybe if he gets a second term. Nonetheless, revivifying conservatism almost before books announcing its death could be published qualifies as a feat almost...]]> Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The revelation of an Iranian uranium-enrichment facility buried in a mountain at an Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps base near the religious city of Qom might seem ominous. If, that is, the Iranians were determined to develop a nuclear weapon. Fortunately, we are advised that they are not. In November 2007, U.S. intelligence agencies wrote a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) concluding, "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program." The intelligence community appears to be sticking by its judgment, which means - cue the sighs of relief - that the Qom facility may be only a strange curiosity.

Apparently, the Iranian regime is an...]]> Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 At the height of their anti-Iraq War fever, Democrats accused Pres. George W. Bush of cooking up the war for political reasons. It must have been their guilty consciences speaking.

Democrats are the party of extreme situational politics on national security. Almost every major Democrat with presidential aspirations voted to authorize the Iraq War, then turned on it. As the Iraq War spiraled downward, many Democrats called for more troops, then resisted the surge. It has practically been mandatory for all good, card-carrying Democrats to trumpet the centrality of the Afghan War since 2003, using it as a rhetorical club to attack President Bush's focus on Iraq. Now that it is crunch...]]> Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The radical activist group ACORN is the E. F. Hutton of prostitution. It stands ready to provide discreet advice on setting up a brothel and engaging in other, associated acts of criminality. When ACORN talks, pimps and hookers listen.

This has been established by an audacious video sting operation undertaken by guerrilla conservative documentarian James O'Keefe, 25, and his sidekick Hannah Giles, 20. O'Keefe posed as a pimp and Giles as a prostitute seeking help getting a mortgage for a brothel. In cities around the country, workers for ACORN - the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now - happily obliged.

The videos are 60 Minutes for the YouTube age. Posted...]]> Fri, 11 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Everyone marvels at Barack Obama's rhetorical prowess. But don't be overly bedazzled. With these 13 easy steps, you, too, can give a Barack Obama speech.

1) Create a false center. In his speech to a joint session of Congress, Obama positioned himself between the Left's calling for a single-payer system and the Right's agitating to end employer-based health insurance. Presto - he's the very definition of a centrist. Anyone advocating almost any position can benefit from the same insta-centrism.

2) Scorn ideology. Obama warned against "the usual Washington ideological battles." Message: He has no philosophical commitments himself. He's pushing a Great...]]> Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Van Jones spent the 1990s as an avowed Communist. He is an unabashed political hater. He traffics in poisonous "truther" conspiracy theories about 9/11 as an inside job. And, yet, he is a mainstream figure within environmentalism. The real Jones scandal is less his wince-inducingly sophomoric radicalism than how comfortably he fits within the broader world of contemporary liberalism.

Even as Jones was forced from his position as the White House's special adviser for green jobs, the Left had his back. It sputtered at conservatives - damn you, Glenn Beck! - who had publicized his former words. Have they no decency? Howard Dean pronounced Jones "a star," and called his defenestration...]]> Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 IF he wants to prevail in Afghanistan, Barack Obama needs a George W. Bush moment. He'll have to ignore the polls, brush aside doubters in his own party and reinforce a failing war effort.

Bush did all that, and more, when he ordered the surge in Iraq in January 2007. He also had to buck his own military brass and almost the entirety of a foreign-policy establishment that considered the feckless recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton commission holy writ. He operated from a position of political weakness so debilitating, Lyndon Johnson might have identified with it in his final days.

Compared with those headwinds, Obama is experiencing a late-summer breeze on...]]> Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 If Dick Cheney had a fantasy scenario for how the Bush administration interrogation program worked, it might go like this: A top-level al-Qaeda operative is captured, but resists traditional interrogation. He is then waterboarded, after which he becomes an invaluable resource. Eventually, the terrorist conducts tutorials on al-Qaeda doctrine and operations for the benefit of American intelligence officers.

Except it's not a fable. It describes the course of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's post-capture career, according to the Washington Post. The Post report, together with CIA documents released during the past week, demolishes a key argument of opponents of so-called...]]> Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The Obama team is saddled with a foundering health-care strategy. But it has a fallback plan - relying on the sheer dimwitted gullibility of the American public. How stupid do they think we are?

Stupid enough to think that a new $1 trillion health-care entitlement is just the thing to restore the country to fiscal health.

Stupid enough not to know that almost every entitlement known to man has cost more than originally estimated, with a congressional committee in 1967 underestimating by a factor of ten Medicare's cost by 1990.

Stupid enough not to realize that it is through budget trickery - the taxes begin immediately, the spending is put off for a few years - that...]]> Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The best moment of almost every YouTube video of the raucous town-hall meetings on health care is the same: It's the nonplussed look on the face of the senators and congressmen who have rarely suffered such indignity. Be assured: No one talks to them that way in the "members only" elevators in the U.S. Capitol.

Nancy Pelosi and Co. insist that the town-hall protesters are the tools of special interests. Not likely. Almost all of the special interests have been enticed or bullied into cooperating with Obamacare. The alphabet soup of major players on health-care policy is basically on board - PhRMA (the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America), the AMA (American Medical...]]> Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 By all accounts, Barack Obama’s father, the Kenyan student studying in America, was cocksure and impressed with his own talents. The arrogance gene must be dominant. Obama clearly has it.

And that, more than any other factor, is driving his summertime swoon. Hubris made him reach for too much, too soon; brazenly overpromise about the effects of his program; overestimate his control of events; think the golden touch of his brilliant team could solve intractable problems; and believe his words could trump reality.

The Obama team is fiddling with his health-care talking points. But the verbiage is beside the point. What Obama...]]> Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Barack Obama raised near-millennial expectations last year. If elected, he'd transform the dreary realities of Washington with his blazing freshness. He'd win over Republicans with his engaging post-partisanship. He'd solve longstanding national problems with his nonideological pragmatism.

None of this overpromising was ever very likely to come to fruition. But Obama has now fallen down on a much more elemental test of leadership: He can't tell the truth about his signature initiative.

Obama's health-care push has been the most dishonest White House advocacy in recent memory. What he says about reform bears no relation to the legislation he wants Congress to pass as soon as...]]> Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 When Barack Obama pilfered Martin Luther King Jr.'s line about the "fierce urgency of now," he wasn't kidding. The line has come to define his presidency. His legislative strategy moves in two gears - heedlessly fast and recklessly faster.

As with the stimulus package, Obama's health-care plan depends on speed. More important than any given provision, more important than any principle, more important than sound legislating is the urgent imperative to Do It Now.

Do it now, before anyone can grasp what exactly it is that Congress is passing. Do it now, before the overpromising and the dishonest justifications can be exposed. Do it now, before Obama's poll numbers return to...]]> Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Barack Obama spent all of 2008 running against the sputtering economy and warned earlier this year of a crisis "we may not be able to reverse." Yet, as the unemployment rate climbs beyond the administration's projections, Vice President Joe Biden informs us that the administration "misread how bad the economy was."

Apparently we were going to experience a once-in-a-lifetime economic crisis comparable to the Great Depression without a particularly high unemployment rate. This was the promise of the Obama administration, which indulged in hair-raisingly alarmist economic rhetoric while pumping out unduly hopeful economic projections. If the Reagan administration gave us the rosy...]]> Sat, 04 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Last updated: 6:47 amJuly 4, 2009 Posted: 2:01 amJuly 4, 2009

AS a nation, we were extraordinarily blessed in our revolutionaries. It wasn't just that they were brave and determined. So were the avatars of revolution throughout the 20th century who wrecked nations and peoples.

No, what makes them so wondrously distinct is that they were also just and wise, grounded always in a clear-eyed view of human nature.

"There is a degree of depravity in mankind," James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers, "which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust." When revolutionaries talk of depravity, it is often to brand their...]]> Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Last updated: 3:27 amJune 29, 2009 Posted: 2:06 amJune 29, 2009

IS Barack Obama approaching the end of his masterly run?

Starting with his win in the Iowa caucuses in January 2008, he has been, if not the one we've been waiting for, the one best suited to tap the wellsprings of public sentiment and capitalize on political circumstances for his own and his party's benefit.

During his golden year and a half, Obama caught a wave of change that propelled him into the White House, a wave that only grew stronger when he took office amid an economic crisis. When challenged, Obama has resorted to his rhetorical prowess to defuse controversies (the Rev. Wright),...]]> Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Pres. Barack Obama knows health-care policy. Give him an hour and a half to hold forth, as ABC News obligingly did at a town-hall meeting, and he will invariably impress with his fluidity.

This makes it all the more remarkable that he often appears unable to understand how his health-care program threatens private insurance. At a recent press conference, Obama argued that the very notion of it doesn't compute: "If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best-quality health care, if they tell us that they're offering a good deal, then why is it that the government - which they say can't run anything - suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That's not...]]> Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 If only the Obama administration considered motorcycle-riding thugs beating demonstrators in Iran an offense on par with Israel's West Bank settlements.

Then it could speak with moral passion. It could unmistakably denounce the killings, and relieve its State Department spokesman of the trouble of dancing around the word "condemn." It could say that our relationship with the Iranian government depends on the unconditional end of its thuggery. It could explain that only if Iran stops the crackdown can we "move forward" in the Middle East.

But Iran is not an ally of the United States. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei gets a rhetorical pass that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu...]]> Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Where does Newt Gingrich go to get his good name back? He proposed slowing the rate of growth of Medicare and Medicaid in the mid-1990s and was clobbered by Democrats and the press for waging war on the elderly and the indigent.

Now, almost every other day, Barack Obama finds another hundred billion dollars to cut out of Medicare and Medicaid. Over the weekend, he announced the discovery of another $313 billion in savings over ten years, on top of $300 billion he had already proposed. Soon enough, he will make Gingrich - who infamously sought $450 billion in savings over seven years in 1995 - look like an extravagantly generous steward of the nation's health programs.

No...]]> Sat, 13 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 IN a new Gallup Poll asking who is the national leader of the Republican Party, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels didn't even rate an asterisk.

That's unsurprising. The governor of the country's 16th most populous state won't normally garner much national attention, especially when he's an unassuming, old-school budget cutter.

It's also a shame, because more than any other GOP officeholder, Daniels points the way ahead for his bedraggled party. He's a Reaganite who's not trapped in 1980s nostalgia; he's a fiscal conservative who believes not just in limiting government, but in reforming it to address people's everyday concerns; he's a politician of principle who refuses to sell...]]> Tue, 09 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner wasn't playing for yucks when he visited China last week. But when he told students at a Chinese university that China's assets in the U.S. are "very safe," the audience burst out in laughter.

The Chinese own so much of our debt, they have a keen interest in U.S. fiscal probity, and apparently they take a dim view of our ability to achieve it. The mandarins of a notionally communist government are now forced to harangue the world's emblematic capitalist country about its ever-spiraling public debt. Mao Zedong and John D. Rockefeller must be spinning in their graves, at an equal rate though in different directions.

The students didn't even...]]> Sat, 06 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 BARACK Obama's election had the potential to be the nation's most consequential act of public diplomacy since the Marshall Plan.

The story of his rise highlighted the openness of American society, his personal connection to Islam set him up as a powerful spokesman to a part of the world that bedevils and threatens us, and as a decisive break from the hated George W. Bush, he represented a fresh start when the world yearned for one.

President Obama realized some of this promise in his flawed but still worthy Cairo address.

Consider these extraordinary facts: In a rapturously received speech in the heart of the Arab world, Obama extolled America as "one of the greatest...]]> Fri, 29 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The interlocking directorate is anathema to trustbusters and corporate watchdogs. It occurs when a board member or top executive of one company sits on the board of another company, accumulating undue power over a given industry. When it reduces competition, the arrangement is forbidden by the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914.

If Henry De Lamar Clayton, the Alabama congressman who introduced the aforementioned act, were still with us, he'd presumably be shocked at the creation of the most far-reaching interlocking directorate in U.S. history. Obama Inc. has effectively won a seat on the board of companies at the heart of the nation's industrial production and its financial system....]]> Wed, 27 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 It was a historic day when Pres. Barack Obama announced his nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. No president had ever nominated a Hispanic woman. Nor had a recent president - or his nominee - expressed less genuine interest in the traditional craft of judging.

Impartiality has been supplanted by empathy. The old-fashioned virtue of objectivity - redolent of dusty law books and the unromantic task of parsing the law and facts - is giving way to an inherently politicized notion of judging based on feelings. Lady Justice is to slip her blindfold and let her decisions be influenced by her life experiences and personal predilections.

Obama and Sotomayor...]]> Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Put Barack Obama in front of a teleprompter and one thing is certain - he'll make himself appear the most reasonable person in the room.

Rhetorically, he is in the middle of any debate, perpetually surrounded by finger-pointing extremists who can't get over their reflexive combativeness and ideological fixations to acknowledge his surpassing thoughtfulness and grace.

This is how Obama, whose position on abortion is indistinguishable from NARAL's, can speechify on abortion at Notre Dame and come away sounding like a pitch-perfect centrist. It's natural, then, that his speech at the National Archives on national security should superficially sound soothing, reasonable, and...]]> Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Next, Nancy Pelosi should find a way to work in the Bilderberg Group, the annual gathering of global elites that is a perennial obsession of conspiracy theorists. It's the only thing missing from her wild tale of CIA misconduct that's so implausible, she had trouble keeping it straight at her instantly notorious "I was misled" press conference.

For Pelosi's account to be accurate, the CIA must have engaged in one of the most baroque and ineffectual conspiracies in the history of Washington. Remember: Pelosi claims that the CIA lied to her in a September 2002 classified briefing and told her that it hadn't waterboarded high-level al-Qaeda detainee Abu Zubaydah. To support her...]]> Fri, 15 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 DICK Cheney is getting vindication from an unlikely source -- the very Obama administration he's bedeviling in all his TV interviews.

The former vice president has dared to defend the Bush administration from charges that it ran a torturing, Constitution-shredding criminal enterprise for years under the guise of the "War on Terror." He's been duly subjected to the Two Minutes Hate -- on an endless loop -- from all the people who want him to slink to an undisclosed location never to emerge again.

Cheney's defense is so notable because he's so lonely. As the Bush administration is accused of war crimes, other Bush stalwarts have fallen silent. Where is Condi Rice (who at...]]> Fri, 24 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 THE calendar says President Obama took office in 2009, although that's only a technicality. In his own mind, Obama ascended in Year Zero, a time of ritualistic cleansing in preparation for the relaunching of an America free from its past sins.

Has a US president ever appeared less vested in his nation's history than Obama? He shrugged off a rancid attack on America by Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega at the Summit of the Americas, including a rant on the Bay of Pigs operation in 1961, by saying he was only 3 months old at the time. Nothing to do with me. It's Obama's own personal novus ordo seclorum....]]> Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The debate over the just-released Justice Department memorandums on interrogation techniques ended as soon as they were dubbed the "torture memos." Forevermore, they will be remembered as the legal lowlights of a "dark and painful chapter in our history," as Pres. Barack Obama put it.

Rightly considered, the memos should be a source of pride. They represent a nation of laws struggling to defend itself against a savage, lawless enemy while adhering to its legal commitments and norms. Most societies throughout human history wouldn't have bothered.

The memos cite conduct that is indisputably torture from a court case involving Serbs abusing Muslims in Bosnia: "severe beatings...]]> Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 If every Obama-era negotiation is as clear-eyed and unsentimental as that over the fate of Capt. Richard Phillips, the nation's interests will be well-served.

President Obama approved negotiations with the Somali pirates holding Phillips, but authorized force should Phillips appear to be in imminent danger. When one of the pirates pointed his AK-47 at Phillips' back, snipers aboard the nearby USS Bainbridge took out the three pirates with three shots -- not a bullet wasted.

Suddenly, the headline The New York Times had run about the spectacle didn't seem so apt: "Standoff With Pirates Shows US Power Has Limits."

Pirates couldn't conduct their business without safe...]]> Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Even its harshest detractors have to admit that the National Security Act did what it said; TARP is one the great misnomers in U.S. government. So far, the program has had nothing to do with troubled assets and has been used for purposes far afield of the justification -- getting such assets off the balance sheets of the banks -- presented to Congress when it passed last fall.

How many legislators thought that in supporting TARP they were giving the federal government the power to bail out the auto industry, let alone fire a CEO and effectively run companies? When word came down in October that GMAC, the financial arm of General Motors, was considering becoming a bank holding...]]> Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 North Korea's diplomatic and economic strategy for two decades has been to engage in spectacular acts of international malfeasance to bully and cajole the world into concessions and aid. In between provocations, Pyongyang has promised several times over to abandon its nuclear program. It has never truly given it up, lest it lose its most prized bargaining chip.

As soon as the U.N. Security Council passes another ineffectual resolution regretting the defiance of its last ineffectual resolution (assuming it can manage even that), North Korea knows it will eventually find the Obama administration back at a negotiating table for the charade's next act. Kims, father and son, have...]]> Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Obama and Medvedev agreed to negotiate a new arms-control treaty and work together on a host of initiatives from the Afghan War to the Iranian nuclear program. Medvedev -- and his master, Vladimir Putin -- must be delighted enough to consider sanctioning the beating of yet another meddlesome journalist in celebration.

"[The meeting] brought Russia a shot of prestige, upbeat headlines about nuclear-arms cuts and a powerful signal that Moscow has the ear of the new U.S. president," the Associated Press wrote. "The price tag for Russia so far: virtually zero." Medvedev likes that price point.

"We, the leaders of Russia and the United States, are ready to move beyond Cold War...]]> Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500 AIG has been the bailout from hell, dysfunctional and opaque. The government has had to restructure its rescue over and over, throwing billions more into its maw. Only now have we learned the identity of the true recipients of the bailout, the so-called counterparties to AIG's credit default swaps, financial firms strewn around Wall Street and the globe, from Goldman Sachs to Deutsche Bank and France's Société Générale.

AIG first got bailed in the days after Lehman Brothers's bankruptcy put the financial system on the brink and policymakers didn't have the nerve to let another financial giant go down. It was the right call at the time, but the lesson of the AIG fiasco is...]]> Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Last updated: 4:39 am
March 14, 2009
Posted: 1:25 am
March 14, 2009

BARACK Obama has per fected a three-step maneu ver that could never even be attempted by a politician lacking his rhetorical skill or cool cynicism.

First: Denounce your presidential predecessor for a given policy, energizing your party's base and capitalizing on his abiding unpopularity.

Second: Pretend to have reversed that policy upon taking office with a symbolic act or high-profile statement.

Third: Adopt a version of that same policy, knowing that it's the only way to govern responsibly or believing doing otherwise is too difficult.

...]]>