A Brief History…

UPDATE 2: Well, I guess he didn’t have the votes after all. The midnight oil is off.

UPDATE: Harry Reid has just announced: Look, if this group of 17 bipartisan senators think they’re going to change the bill substantially, they’ve got another thing coming. We’re going to have a vote, I’m going to have the votes, and we’re going to get this through.

The Congressional Budget Office has said: President Obama’s economic recovery package will actually hurt the economy more in the long run than if he were to do nothing, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.

CBO, the official scorekeepers for legislation, said the House and Senate bills will help in the short term but result in so much government debt that within a few years they would crowd out private investment, actually leading to a lower Gross Domestic Product over the next 10 years than if the government had done nothing.

CBO estimates that by 2019 the Senate legislation would reduce GDP by 0.1 percent to 0.3 percent on net. [The House bill] would have similar long-run effects, CBO said in a letter to Sen. Judd Gregg, New Hampshire Republican, who was tapped by Mr. Obama on Tuesday to be Commerce Secretary.

Okay, now we know.

Casey Stengel famously complained that the early New York Mets were so inept that he wondered if anybody knew how to play the game. After two weeks of watching the Obama people fumble, I have similar thoughts. Of course, they have told us that the people like Geithner are so important that it doesn’t matter that he didn’t pay his taxes. I guess Daschle wasn’t that important, but Geithner is irreplaceable.

The White House defended the exceptions on the grounds that these people were exceptionally qualified. This is such a reasonable argument that the White House easily could have made it on the front end.

Huh ?

There is no one else ?

Daschle’s negligence was gross, particularly for a party and an administration that have celebrated prostration before the taxman as a “patriotic duty.” But Daschle’s offenses, galling as they may be, are exceeded by those of Geithner. Indeed, of all the tax transgressions touching Obama’s circle, Geithner’s are the worst.

Not only did Geithner neglect to pay his taxes, he turned a buck by doing so—accepting payments from his employer for the very purpose of offsetting those taxes. When he took the money, he signed a statement promising to pay the taxes and then ignored his obligations—for years. Protected by a statute of limitations, he did not pay his 2001–02 taxes until his nomination made them a public issue.

If Daschle’s tax problems should bar him from managing the federal health-services bureaucracy and Killefer’s preclude her from scrutinizing the budget, how is it that Geithner’s transgressions—the worst of the lot—are insufficient to disqualify him from managing the same Internal Revenue Service whose attentions he evaded?

Well, at least the stimulus bill is popular, or it is if you count 37% as popular.

Well, there is always foreign policy. Of course, choosing ambassadors to crucial countries is not that important. Zinni will not forget this soon.

Unemployment in Russia is rising fast, and the currency, the ruble, has lost about a fifth of its value. $200 billion—a third of the reserves—have already been spent supporting the ruble, so that further devaluation seems a virtual certainty Foreign investors have withdrawn billions of dollars.

All of which encourages the Kremlin to go on the attack in classic style. We already know how Putin and company treat Georgia.

Now, they are going after a crucial ally in Afghanistan.

Russia has ensnared Kirghizstan with the usual blend of violence, cunning and bribery. In recent weeks, Russia began by attacking the Kirghiz internet infrastructure. Then it simply bought the country with a multi-billion dollar loan to plug the deficit in the Kirghiz budget, with additional hundreds of millions of dollars in write-offs and grants. More than that, according to the Daily Telegraph, what are delicately called “bonuses” and “emoluments” were paid to officials. The money may be running out in Moscow, and the currency about to crash, but power still remains power.

As part of this murky business, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, the Kirghiz president, has ordered the United States to quit the former Soviet base it rented at Manas, close to the country’s capital of Bishkek. Manas is needed to ferry supplies to American and other forces over the border in Afghanistan, and squadrons of fighter jets are also stationed there. President Obama has been promising increased operations against Afghan Islamists, but the closing of Manas will seriously impede any such development.

Oh well, who cares about Kirghizstan ? One of those unpronounceable former Soviet republics. The only problem is that our routes to supply the troops in Afghanistan are very limited. There is Kirghizstan to the north and Pakistan to the south. Now, one of them is gone.

David Pryce-Jones refers to this as Obama’s “Carter moment.”

When the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan back in 1979 and began that poor country’s destruction, then President Jimmy Carter feebly lamented that he’d just learned what he was up against.

Unfortunately, it isn’t just Obama who is “up against” this situation. It is all of us.

Tags: Afghanistan, Geithner, Internal Revenue Service, Obama, Pakistan, russia

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 6:36 am and is filed under financial, military, politics, science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.