As Jonah Goldberg writes, “Our political leaders believe in two different Americas; they even believe in two different Constitutions:”

Pres. Calvin “Silent Cal” Coolidge, the poster boy for the ’20s, was once asked what he thought of his achievements in office. He replied: “Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.”

That was the return to normalcy FDR was talking about. A government minding its own business, according to FDR, amounted to the spirit of fascism.

It’s not hard to see why so many liberals today take one look at the vast gatherings of decent, middle-class Americans known as tea parties and instantly think, “Fascists!” Never mind that fascists, properly understood, don’t usually demand less government intervention.

What we have here is a fundamental conflict of visions, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Sowell. One side believes that people are born into their station in life and that it is the government’s job to make their miserable lives a little better. Indeed, it is the natural order of things for the government to provide jobs, health care, and homes to the people. If you object to this concept of government, it must be because you want to “punish” the downtrodden and discriminated. You must be animated by racism, sexism, greed — “fascism!”

The other side says that our rights come from God, not from government. That while the government has an obligation to promote the general welfare, it doesn’t have a holy writ to design the nation as it sees fit. The Constitution is not a coupon insert in your local paper, brimming with all sorts of giveaways and two-for-one deals. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights delineate what the government cannot do, not what it can. What was so fantastic and revolutionary about that is that for the first time in history, a nation was founded on the proposition that the government should mind its own business. Believing that doesn’t make you a fascist, it makes you a patriot.

But the leaders of one America don’t see it that way, and probably never will. Which is why, whatever happens in Congress in the coming days and weeks, it will be “two Americas” for a very long time.

Read the whole thing. And then check out James Lileks, who flashes back to the days of the original Great Recession, circa 1976 to 1979.

Compare and contrast the thoughts of representatives associated with the Reuters news agency on Middle Eastern terrorists with American conservatives. Regarding the former, let’s flashback to Stephen Jukes, then the global news editor for Reuters on September 11th, 2001. As James Taranto wrote:

Stephen Jukes, global news editor for Reuters, the British wire service, has ordered his scribes not to use the word terror to refer to the Sept. 11 atrocity. . . . “We all know that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist,” Jukes writes in an internal memo. “To be frank, it adds little to call the attack on the World Trade Center a terrorist attack.”

So while a radical terrorist such Osama bin Laden or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed deserve special nuance from Reuters, what about half of the American people? Check out this article from Godfrey Hodgson, in MercatorNet, which describes him as:

“[The former] director of the Reuters’ Foundation Programme at Oxford University, and before that the Observer’s correspondent in the United States and foreign editor of the Independent. His most recent book is The Myth of American Exceptionalism (Yale University Press, 2009).”

And with a C.V. like that, Hodgson’s take on recent American history is just about as reactionary as you’d expect (emphasis in passages below mine):

During the cold-war years, and especially after the disgrace of Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954, public life in the United States was dominated by what I have called “the liberal consensus”. This does not mean (as conservative commentators occasionally try to suggest) that America was subject to the will of a liberal elite indifferent to the feelings and interests of “ordinary” Americans; it means that the public sphere, and in particular the mood of Congress, was ruled by a vast if unspoken compact in which the different political sides accepted elements of the other’s doctrine.

Thus, most liberals (who could equally be described as social democrats and progressives) shared the conservative, anti-communist ideology of the era; this was as true of the labour unions as it was of the Kennedy administration. At the same time, most conservatives accepted, if often grudgingly, the underlying principles of Roosevelt’s new deal; this could be said of the majority of elected Republicans, and the dominant figures and thinkers in corporate business-management and the law. [This gets history exactly wrong. Most conservatives, whether pre-National Review paleocons such as Albert J. Nock, or proto-libertarians such as Ayn Rand and even H.L. Mencken did not accept, grudgingly or otherwise the New Deal. And the Republicans of the time in office were "me too" Rockefeller liberals, until Barry Goldwater and then Reagan began making inroads in the 1960s. -- Ed]

The Kennedy-Johnson years saw many “outliers” to both left and right: union leaders, black leaders, intellectuals on the left, and old Taftite or new Goldwaterite conservatives. But it is possible to speak, without doing violence to the truth, of a liberal consensus in American public philosophy in the period. In broad terms, Americans accepted social-democratic government and a mixed economy at home and the containment of communism as the chief principle of foreign policy.

Since 1968, everything has changed – in such a way that the world in which Lyndon Johnson could dominate the political scene has disappeared into the “urns and sepulchres of mortality”.

Before 1965, each of the two parties that dominated American politics was a coalition of ideologically and demographically distinct elements. The division between them was rooted in the events of the 1860s: civil war, the emancipation of the slaves, the reconstruction of the south and its ending. The legacy of these events was that the core cleavage in American party politics was not a straightforward left-right one.

But since Richard Nixon’s years in power (1968-74), [even though Nixon governed domestically as an extension of LBJ's Great Society? -- Ed] and even more since Ronald Reagan’s (1980-89), the division between the parties has become as ideological – and as much a conflict between “haves” and “have-nots” – as in Europe. The pivot was the events of the 1960s: the civil-rights struggles, the Vietnam war, the early women’s movement, and the decade’s social libertinism.

* * *

The large shift in the intellectual history of the United States in the late 20th century continued as conservative ideas advanced in the law schools and eventually the Supreme Court. The court, once controlled by a liberal majority that accepted the doctrine of social activism inherited from Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis D Brandeis, came to acquire a more or less reliable five-to-four permanent majority on the right. A single example can stand for many: the Buckley vs Valeo judgment in 1974, which held that political ads were free speech and thus protected by the first amendment to the constitution. This ended attempts to reform the electoral-finance system.

Perhaps even more important in America’s large-scale move to the right was the changing profile of the news industry. The fashionable depiction of a liberal media establishment had always been exaggerated; the majority of journalists may long have been liberals, but most of their bosses were always conservatives. [So what? This is a variation on the Folk Marxist trope that all businesses are conservative. -- Ed] If the news media had once sustained the “liberal consensus”, however, there has been a steady change over the last half century in the direction of more variety and then more conservatism. [Sure. Just look at their voting records. -- Ed]

A few landmarks indicate the trend. William F Buckley’s founding of the National Review in 1955 broke the monopoly of liberalism in the intellectual magazines. Robert Bartley’s promotion to head of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal in 1972 (for which he had worked since 1964) allowed him to make it the vehicle of undiluted conservative propaganda. [Only in the editorial section. -- Ed] Between the the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, the three television networks found their New-York-liberal tone gradually diluted – first by the appearance of cable (albeit the pioneering Atlanta-based CNN was relatively liberal), then by the foundation of Fox News, owned by Rupert Murdoch and controlled by Richard Nixon’s spin-doctor Roger Ailes. [Until Fox News came along, how exactly did cable TV in and of itself "dilute" the monolithic liberal nature of the Legacy Media, since, as Hodgson acknowledges, CNN was and is liberal. -- Ed]

The result of this overall social and intellectual progression (or regression) has been a profound change in the United States’s ideological weather. The difference helps to explain why Lyndon Johnson could preside over a monsoon of liberal legislation that completed and in some ways transcended the achievements of his hero Franklin Roosevelt, whereas Barack Obama’s more modest reform efforts have become mired in frustration amid bitter polarisation and populist resurgence.

President Obama reached office on the promise of changing America. But the country had already changed. It is time to shift attention from the individual personality and specific failures of the president to what has happened to the United States’s public philosophy and its political-media climate.

So there you have it. In the morally inverted world of Reuters, Osama bin Laden could be a terrorist…or he could be a freedom fighter! (Tell that to those who died on 9/11, or those whom Al Qeada and the Taliban would return to a Stone Age lifestyle.)

But those conservatives seeking to be free from statism in America represent “regression”, not to mention “bitter polarisation and populist resurgence”, ginned up by Rupert Murdoch, the English left’s favorite boogieman, and “controlled by Richard Nixon’s spin-doctor Roger Ailes.”

Great job, Reuters. I’d suggest picking up a few extra gallons of condescension from the company store, but I doubt you’ll run out anytime soon. Or as Theodore Dalrymple notes on the Pajamas homepage, “Our Contemporary Sanctimony Puts the Victorians to Shame.”

(H/T: The Brothers Judd.)

Update: ABC’s Peter Jennings had a worldview quite similar to Reuters. Evidently the network believes such an anti-American, pro-Middle Eastern tone has been lacking since his untimely passing, something they plan to rectify shortly.

Or, civilization, and its disconnects.

Jennifer Rubin:

After Scott Brown’s victory, we heard that the White House was going to “pivot” toward jobs. But the Obami did no such thing. Doubling down, and doubling down again, became the order of the day. We’ve had 24/7 coverage of health care — when not interrupted by news of a new low in U.S.-Israeli relations. So how’s that affecting Obama’s standing? For the first time, he’s “upside down” in Gallup — with 46 approving and 47 percent disapproving of his performance. Over at Rasmussen, only 44 percent of voters approve of Obama’s performance.

For members of Congress, it’s getting harder and harder to deny reality. Whether one looks at the generic congressional polling or the president’s own standing (which is as good a predictor as any of the fate of his party in the midterm election), the conclusion is the same: ObamaCare and the attendant procedural stunts are political losers for the Democrats. Republicans are struggling mightily to defeat ObamaCare, but one senses it’s a predicament that’s not altogether unwelcome. After all, running against ObamaCare and Democratic tricksterism may have its benefits both in November and in 2012.

Inside the president’s inner circle, it’s bunker time:

The New York Times gives us a glimpse into David Axelrod’s mood, which confirms exactly what the president tends to exude when talking about critics:

In an interview in his office, Mr. Axelrod was often defiant, saying he did not give a “flying” expletive “about what the peanut gallery thinks” and did not live for the approval “of the political community.” He denounced the “rampant lack of responsibility” of people in Washington who refuse to solve problems, and cited the difficulty of trying to communicate through what he calls “the dirty filter” of a city suffused with the “every day is Election Day sort of mentality.”

Unfortunately for the White House, these days “the peanut gallery” critics more often than not are reflecting what many Americans outside the Beltway are saying. And that’s not just an Election Day concern for those in the White House. Their jobs there entail representing those who sent them to Washington in the first place.

Meanwhile, the president, who told Fox News’ Bret Baier that “I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about what the procedural rules are in the House or Senate,” disregards your reality, and substitutes his own:

BAIER: Do you know which specific deals are in or out, as of today?

OBAMA: I am certain that we’ve made sure, for example, that any burdens on states are alleviated, when it comes to what they’re going to have to chip in to make sure that we’re giving subsidies to small businesses, and subsidies to individuals, for example.

BAIER: So the Connecticut deal is still in?

OBAMA: So that’s not — that’s not going to be something that is going to be in this final package. I think the same is true on all of these provisions. I’ll give you some exceptions though.

Something that was called a special deal was for Louisiana. It was said that there were billions — millions of dollars going to Louisiana, this was a special deal. Well, in fact, that provision, which I think should remain in, said that if a state has been affected by a natural catastrophe, that has created a special health care emergency in that state, they should get help. Louisiana, obviously, went through Katrina, and they’re still trying to deal with the enormous challenges that were faced because of that.

(CROSS TALK)

OBAMA: That also — I’m giving you an example of one that I consider important. It also affects Hawaii, which went through an earthquake.

But of course. Video of the earthquake here:

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Incidentally, Jim Hoft quotes ABC News’ Jonathan Karl’s report on the “Louisiana Purchase”, who said, “I am told the section applies to exactly one state:  Louisiana, the home of moderate Democrat Mary Landrieu, who has been playing hard to get on the health care bill.”

As Cassy Fiano notes:

This moment, from Bret Baier’s interview on Fox News with Obama, might just be one of the biggest “WTF?!” moments from Obama’s presidency yet. Obama is either completely making things up, living in an alternate reality, or really, really confused.

Concurrent with the administration and the left-hand side of Congress continuing to distance themselves from reality, as Mark Steyn noted recently, the American people are becoming increasingly re-engaged with politics:

Jonah, I enjoyed your column today – a nice rebuke to David Brooks’ latest silly unpersuasive thesis. You write:

[Michael] Lind argues that the right has become a “counterculture [that] refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of the rules of the game that it has lost”… Whereas the Luddites and know-nothings once dropped out for the “Summer of Love,” today’s Luddites and know-nothings have signed up for the “Winter of Hate.”

That’s almost exactly backwards. There was more right-wing “dropping out” in the Nineties, when Dan Rather was warning of”the shadowy right-wing militia movement” and there was a kind of psychological Ruby Ridge siege mentality among a certain sliver of the right: Find a strip of land, live off the grid, stockpile ammunition, raise emus for meat, and keep your eyes peeled. There’s your right-wing counterculture.

A New Hampshire neighbor of mine did this for a while. Then he figured out the ATF guys don’t need to besiege his stockade. What with GPS and so forth, Obama can take him out with an unmanned drone launched from Diego Garcia and no-one would know a thing about it. So he came back down to town and ran for the Select Board as a budget-cutter – and won.

The Tea Party has a certain paradoxical quality – a mass movement of self-reliant individuals, etc. But Brooks and Lind are wrong: It represents a conscious re-engagement, and a rejection of dropping out. That’s why the left is rattled.

On the other hand, as Iowahawk satirically notes, channeling his inner Mamet, and (language alert) firing plenty of F***ing F-bombs along the way, patent medicine salesmen who are desperate enough will do pretty much anything to earn a commission.

Update: Roger L. Simon adds:

When you think over the last year, it’s clear Obama has some of the most inept advisers in recent presidential history. Allowing him to risk his entire presidency on a global overhaul of health care – when an incremental overhaul could have been had simply for the asking – seems absurd politics, win or lose. It also isn’t worth that much in the grand scheme of things – other than the obvious, increasing the amount of the economy under government control. The nostalgia for marxism inherent in it all this almost pathetic. Don’t these people live in the real world?

But now it all makes sense! Too much Hopium being smoked in the DC hookahs.

At Big Hollywood, James Hudnall has a Climategate-related question. He asks,  “What Will Television Do With All Their Scare-Programming?” Read the whole thing; there’s too much for me to quote to do it justice. But here’s the pith of the gist of the marrow, as James Lileks might say:

But two things happened last year that shot an arrow in the heart of the beast; one of the worst winters on record and Climategate. And the hits keep on coming. Now it turns out that NASA, who claimed for years that their data proves Global Warming is real, was actually just using CRU data all along. And the CRU couldn’t back up any of its data. In fact, they “lost the records” when they were forced to produce them. Oops!

So now these news channels who’ve been trumpeting the story as fact, all those cable networks who spent millions on documentaries hyping it, all those TV shows hawking green as the in color; they all look like fools. Or worse, they look like they were in on what will go down as one of the biggest scams in human history.

What would you do if you were in their position? It’s not hard to understand why they’re carrying on like Climategate never happened. They have a president in the White House as clueless as they are, pushing the Cap and Trade agenda as if those darn glaciers are just about melted. We have to do something fast! Not a moment too soon, kiddies.

The climate scam is worth trillions of dollars and who knows how many millions, if not billions have been spent to win over the public. Too bad the public is losing interest fast. People are increasingly saying it’s all made up or at best, exaggerated. You can’t put toothpaste back in the tube. The proverbial genie is out of the bottle, The cat has left the bag. There’s no going back to the lies and spin. But our friends in the media are still living a lie. It’s like they threw a party and only their mom and a few friends showed up. What was once a hip thing to be a part of, like smoking, is fast becoming a loser tattoo on their foreheads.

The public’s trust is evaporating and it’s not helping that many in the media are circling the wagons. As their ratings drop and their Nielsens tank, as the suits upstairs start laying off staff, they’re going to have to deal with reality. Something they’ve tried to deny all these years. Yes, folks. The warm-mongers are in fact the deniers.

The economy is in a down-spiral. Telling people they need to cut back is like rubbing salt in their wounds. Promising them “green jobs” is like telling a 40 year old Santa Claus is coming to town.

A 1930s scare film such as Reefer Madness was seen as high camp by liberals by the time the 1970s rolled around, as were Jack Webb’s anti-communist efforts of the late ‘1950s. But seventies liberals, perhaps spurred on by the title of Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book Future Shock, if not the actual contents, had plenty of fears of their own, and wanted you to share the cold sweat of their own brand of paranoia.

Recall the horrific slate of politically-oriented science fiction films that Hollywood churned out in-between 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and 1977’s Star Wars. Films such as Soylent Green, Silent Running and ZPG were obsessed with the Malthusian nightmares of overpopulation and deforestation that dominated the overculture of the time. Rollerball depicted a world controlled by giant corporations, at precisely the same time that Steve and Woz were cobbling together the first Apples in their Bay Area garage. They were followed by Leonard Nimoy’s cheesy synthesizer-scored In Search Of TV series a few years later, which explored Global Cooling, Killer Bees, Deadly Ants, and other ’70s obsessions.

Today, these ’70s efforts are seen as equally campy as Refer Madness became three or four decades after its release. The eco-doomsday films of the naughts, such as The Day After Tomorrow, M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, and Al Gore’s own An Inconvenient Truth are well on the way to becoming late night camp TV themselves, and at much faster rate as their equally schlocky predecessors.

Perhaps someone can recut Al’s film and dub it “Climate Madness.” Maybe hire William Shatner to cut an exaggerated Jack Webb-style parody opening.

Who knows: “Climate Madness” could eventually even have the same impact on its genre as his wife Tipper’s efforts to curb raunchy lyrics in pop music.

Related: Zombie observes some camp Malthusian performance art on the Streets of San Francisco, here.

As Noemie Emery writes at the Weekly Standard, the ObamaCare train wreck is “beginning to look like The Godfather crossed with a Marx Brothers movie, a bad sign for an administration that came in touting competence and projecting the feel of a Frank Capra film:”

Strangest of all is the popular theory that if the bill passes​—by bribes, threats, and payoffs, and against fierce opposition—there will be a triumphant, Rose Garden signing, and then the whole issue will fade. Good luck with that. A bill forced through against such popular dissent is likely to start, and not settle, contention, for two big reasons.

First, this bill is not only disliked, it is disliked intensely, and across a wide swath of the population. Majorities not only dislike it, but majorities of those majorities dislike it intensely. Twice as many independents dislike as support it intensely, and the intensity of antipathy has only grown. They dislike it intensely because it will affect them intensely, on a personal level. Tax cuts don’t affect everyone equally. Very few people are ever on welfare. Most people who live long enough do get on Medicare, but not everyone does at the same time. Health care involves everyone, every day, on an emotional, primitive, life and death level. Everyone needs doctors. Everyone has had an experience, or has friends and relations who have had the experience, where the right or wrong medical treatment at the right or wrong time by the right or wrong doctor made the difference between life and death, between a full and a partial recovery, and an experience that was neither traumatic nor financially ruinous, or one that was hell on all counts. Everyone fears a system that could give them the wrong doctor instead of the right one at just the wrong moment, and everyone, no matter how rich, strong, well-connected, or seemingly healthy, knows that an accident or a bad diagnosis can come any day. Polls show that most people believe this plan will make their care more expensive, and at the same time, less satisfactory than what they already have. Add to this the fact that the bill by necessity trips a mare’s nest of hot wires—abortion, rationing, euthanasia on the basis of “social utility,” and the whole moral complex of beginning- and end-of-life issues—and one has no reason for thinking this issue will be laid to rest soon.

Second, the bill’s defenders say “process” themes don’t move the public, and they may be right. But what they call “process” in this case reads like “corruption” to others, such as the bribes, threats, and buyoffs with which the bill cleared the Senate. Three hundred million dollars to buy Mary Landrieu, over a billion to pay off Ben Nelson. Besides being corrupt, the administration is looking inept in the bargain: The past week brought Massapiece Theatre, along with the wavering Democratic congressman whose brother was offered a judgeship just as he was being asked to the White House for a collegial talk. This is beginning to look like The Godfather crossed with a Marx Brothers movie, a bad sign for an administration that came in touting competence and projecting the feel of a Frank Capra film.

In fact, the process is part of the problem, and stems from the bill’s weakness, which makes payoffs essential: “Because the legislation is frightening and unpopular, Democrats have had to resort to serial bribery,” writes George Will, correctly. “Massachusetts voted immediately after the corruption of exempting, until 2018, union members from the tax on high value” insurance plans. This and the Cornhusker Kickback helped fuel Scott Brown’s upset, which created the need for still more extravagant buyoffs: Each bribe makes the bill more unpopular, creating the need for more bribes. Senate rules may bore voters, but they find this arresting—one reason the strife will go on.

Other big bills may have been controversial, but most passed in the end by comfortable margins. No reform bill on this grand scale has ever passed in the face of such opposition, with solid majorities so firmly against it, with no votes at all from the opposite party, and with the party in power so split. No such bill had an organized opposition​—the tea party movement—in place against it, ready to march at the first opportunity. Opposition to health care has been very good to the Republican party, and as long as it is, the party will use and run on it. Legal challenges from the states, already in progress, will also add to the air of contention. This is a war that could go on for years.

Liberals say Democrats have to pass this bill to prove they can govern. But will the public see wasting a year on something that’s not a priority, then pushing a bill they don’t want through multiple payoffs, and ending up with something they think will make their lives worse as a species of “governing” they want anything more to do with? Meanwhile, the Democrats are in the intensive care unit, their president wounded, their members demoralized, their coalition in tatters. Come November, voters may decide they’d rather be much less “governed”—or governed by somebody else.

Read the whole thing. And then check out Jonah Goldberg on the antidote: “Reading the Tea Party Leaves:”

The “elite” the restorationists dislike is better understood as a “new class” (to borrow a phrase from the late Irving Kristol). The legendary economist Joseph Schumpeter predicted in 1942 that capitalism couldn’t survive because capitalist prosperity would feed a new intellectual caste that would declare war on the bourgeois values and institutions that generate prosperity in the first place. When you hear that conservatives are anti-elitist, you should think they’re really anti–new class. Conservatives see this new class of managers, meddlers, planners, and scolds as a kind of would-be secular aristocracy empowered to declare war on traditional arrangements and make other decisions “for your own good.”

And that’s why Obama backlash is part of the culture war. Defenders of Obamacare, cap-and-trade, and the rest of the Democratic agenda insist that they’re merely applying the principles of good governance and the lessons of sound, sober-minded policymaking. No doubt there’s some truth to that, at least in terms of their motives. But from a broader perspective, it is obvious that theirs is a cultural agenda as well.

The quest for single-payer health care is not primarily grounded in good economics or in good politics but in a heartfelt ideological desire for “social justice.” The constant debate over whether the “European model” is better than ours often sounds like an empirical debate, but at its core it’s a cultural and philosophical argument that stretches back more than a century.

The restorationists reside on one side of that debate, while the Obama administration and the bulk of the progressive establishment reside on the other. And that debate is far from over.

As John Hinderaker asks at Power Line, “Why Be Like Sweden?”

In “Keynesian Economics, Exposed; Godwin’s Law, Broken,” a post linked on the Pajamas homepage, Steve Green sets the Wayback machine to the 1920s and ’30s:

Via my Year One blogging buddy, Pejman Yousefzadeh, comes this happy fun story about America’s good credit:

Moody’s Investor Service, the credit rating agency, will fire a warning shot at the US on Monday, saying that unless the country gets public finances into better shape than the Obama administration projects there would be “downward pressure” on its triple A credit rating.

Examining the administration’s outlook for the federal budget deficit, the agency said: “If such a trajectory were to materialise, there would at some point be downward pressure on the triple A rating of the federal government.”

If you had a time machine and it was good for only one trip, would you go back and give contraceptives to Hitler’s parents — or to the parents of John Maynard Keynes?

Obviously, I’m being facetious, but only by half.

Hitler discredited fascism, by launching wars of aggression and sending millions of Jews, Gypsies, gays, and the handicapped to the gas chambers. And, minus the extent that he started all those wars and killed all those people — well, good for Hitler.

Again, obviously, I’m being facetious.

But I’m not being facetious at all when I tell you that Keynes legitimized fascism, by giving decent, liberal democracies license to tax and spend and borrow in the name of political expedience.

Look, whatever Keynes may have gotten right — I suppose he could wipe his own bottom unassisted — what he got wrong is precisely what bedevils us today. And Keynes, the fascistic bastard, I think got it wrong on purpose.

Let me explain.

Quite famously, Keynes wrote, “In the long run we are all dead.” Which politicians of the Great Depression, and long thereafter, took to mean, “Right now I can buy votes with money borrowed from people who aren’t even born.” And Keynes enabled them. Keynesian theory held that governments should save money in the good times, so that they could spend it during lean times to “stimulate” the economy.

Gee, where have we heard that word before?

But let’s be frank here. That bit Keynes said about saving money must have been with a wink and a nod and a nudge, nudge — because popular democracies almost never save any money. And Keynes was too smart not to know it, and too conniving not to say it.

Of course, Keynesian theory also held that inflation and recession couldn’t coexist — but then Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter and the 1970s came along and disproved all that. And yet, somehow, liberal governments still hold by Keynes.

But why?

Click over to read the whole thing.

As Roger L. Simon writes, with the healthcare bill possibly slipping even further into the month, the president is not a happy man right now:

[T]he Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt, no conservative by any stretch, is detecting a “happiness deficit” in our president:

Here’s a theory about why President Obama is having a tough political time right now: He doesn’t seem all that happy being president.I know, it’s the world’s hardest job, and between war and the world economy collapsing, he didn’t have the first year he might have wished for. And, yes, he’s damned either way: With thousands of Americans risking their lives overseas and millions losing their jobs at home, we’d slam him if he acted carefree.

Still, I think Americans want a president who seems, despite everything, to relish the challenge. They don’t want to have to feel grateful to him for taking on the burden.

Hiatt concludes:

A year later, here’s how they [the Obamas] came across to People Magazine:

“It was their first interview of the New Year on Jan. 8 in the rose-colored library on the ground floor of the White House. President Obama spoke in such a hush about the loneliness of his decisions on war and terrorism that one could hear between his words the tick of an old lighthouse clock across the room.”

Do Americans really want to hear the tick of the old lighthouse clock? Or would they prefer the good cheer that we associate with FDR or JFK, the jauntiness with which they took over the White House and made it theirs?

Less lugubriousness wouldn’t necessarily buy him a health-care bill. But in the long run, Americans might find it easier to root for or with Obama if he’d show us, despite everything, that he’s happy we hired him.

Well, this morning at least, it doesn’t look as if there is going to be a health-care bill – one that passes anyway. The Dem Whip is opining that the vote could slip past Easter – a sure sign the bill is in trouble. Conventional wisdom had it that Obama postponed his Asian trip to get the thing passed before Easter, for fear that when the Members returned to their home districts for vacation they would get a negative earful from their constituents. Well… look what’s going to happen. It’s not a cure for depression.

ONE OTHER NOTE on Presidential Depression: What we may be watching is what happens when a man who has faced very little adversity in his life finally has to.

Clearly the president could use a little relaxation right now. I suggest he (and you) tune into this hit, hip new sitcom. It’s a show about the ultimate show about nothing!

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Ed Morrissey writes, “For the first time, the Social Security Administration will start cashing in its IOUs from the Treasury in order to meet its benefits obligations”:

We’ve noticed the cash shortfalls at Social Security for more than a year, and now they appear to be permanent.  For the first time, the Social Security Administration will start cashing in its IOUs from the Treasury in order to meet its benefits obligations.  Unfortunately, the Treasury doesn’t have the cash, either:

The retirement nest egg of an entire generation is stashed away in this small town along the Ohio River: $2.5 trillion in IOUs from the federal government, payable to the Social Security Administration.

It’s time to start cashing them in. … Too bad the federal government already spent that money over the years on other programs, preferring to borrow from Social Security rather than foreign creditors. In return, the Treasury Department issued a stack of IOUs — in the form of Treasury bonds — which are kept in a nondescript office building just down the street from Parkersburg’s municipal offices.

Now the government will have to borrow even more money, much of it abroad, to start paying back the IOUs, and the timing couldn’t be worse. The government is projected to post a record $1.5 trillion budget deficit this year, followed by trillion dollar deficits for years to come.

Social Security’s shortfall will not affect current benefits. As long as the IOUs last, benefits will keep flowing. But experts say it is a warning sign that the program’s finances are deteriorating. Social Security is projected to drain its trust funds by 2037 unless Congress acts, and there’s concern that the looming crisis will lead to reduced benefits.

The IOUs won’t last.  Technically, they’re worthless now.  The Treasury doesn’t have the cash to reimburse Social Security, and we’ll have to sell more debt on the lending markets in order to finance the benefits in the short run.

And as Ed adds, the Moody’s bond rating service is considering lowing America’s debt rating, which will jack up interest rates and make borrowing more expensive.

Gosh, if only someone had proposed fixing Social Security four or five years ago:

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As with socialized medicine, Otto von Bismarck could not be reached for comment.

At National Review, Walter Olson writes, “You know those unseen and undetectable gremlins that hide in Toyota’s electronic throttle controls? Turns out they have it in for elderly drivers:”

You know those unseen and undetectable gremlins that hide in Toyota’s electronic throttle controls? Turns out they have it in for elderly drivers. The Los Angeles Times has compiled a list of 56 fatal incidents over 19 years purportedly involving unintended Toyota acceleration, and according to my Overlawyered co-blogger Ted Frank — in a Thursday analysis refined and extended the next day by Megan McArdle of The Atlantic — the age of the driver can be publicly ascertained in a little more than half the instances. That median age turns out to be 60 — that is to say, half the drivers were that old or older. By contrast, only 16 percent of general auto fatalities in 2008 occurred with a driver 60 or older behind the wheel. Whatever is causing Avalons, Highlanders, and Tundras to misbehave is largely bypassing drivers in their twenties and thirties and instead homing in on drivers old enough to remember the Eisenhower era.

For those who’ve been setting up the Japanese automaker as the latest symbol of heartless capitalism, it’s been a bewildering few days. On Wednesday the media jumped hard for the story of a man who frantically called 911 while his Prius ran away on a San Diego freeway (outstandingly gullible CBS News coverage here). Before long observers had begun poking holes in the story, and colorful details on the man’s earlier doings have been emerging all weekend. On Thursday, meanwhile, the New York Times — whose news columns had helped set the tone for the panic with accusatory coverage — ran what was actually a surprisingly good op-ed advancing the possibility that most of the Toyota cases will turn out to be the result of . . . driver error.

Driver error? You could have spent hours watching the stacked congressional hearings, or the breathless, America-in-crisis coverage on NBC, with no inkling that hitting the gas pedal instead of the brake was any sort of major factor. Certainly the impresarios of the Great Toyota Panic — the members of Congress and their staffs, the TV producers, and above all the consumer advocates with their close trial-lawyer ties — were not at all keen to explore that topic.

Through weeks of Toyota-flaying coverage, these voices — united in Demanding That Action Be Taken even if no one could quite say what was wrong with the cars — seldom acknowledged that unintended acceleration in automobiles is a subject with a long history. Each year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration receives complaints of this sort from owners of all brands of cars; big makers other than Toyota get a goodly share. The volume of complaints ebbs and flows from year to year for reasons that seem to have less to do with cars’ technical features than with media coverage and mass psychology; thus a scare over a given model that grips one country may never reach a second country in which an identical model is sold.

By far the most famous episode of sudden-acceleration panic is the 1986 Audi episode, which took years to fizzle out: Regulators in the United States, Japan, and Canada pronounced that they could find no explanation for the accidents other than “pedal misapplication” or, more bluntly, driver error. The parallels with the Toyota affair — starting, but not ending, with the tendency of acceleration incidents to hit older drivers — are numerous and continue to multiply.

Found via Fausta Wertz, here’ s Michael Fumento discussing the topic on with Neil Cavuto on the Fox Business Channel:

At the start of the month, Rush Limbaugh dubbed ObamaCare as something akin to the Terminator. As Rush quipped, “It starts out looking like it’s just what we need, and then it’s exposed for what it really is.  It’s nothing at all like we see it or imagine it.  But every time you kill it, every way you kill it, it keeps coming back in a new form.”

Stacy McCain has a thorough round-up of links and Blogospheric opinions on its latest incarnation, “ObamaCare 2.0: The 2,309-Page Scam That Will Live In Infamy.”

And speaking of Rush, Mark Steyn sits in for him later today, for some early thoughts on what will likely be the story of the week, no matter what happens in Congress.

Last fall, we linked to this San Diego Union-Tribune cartoon describing California, then and now:

At the True/Slant Website, Michael Roston reached the same conclusion last week:  “California unemployment and Oklahoma’s growth – it’s the ‘Grapes of Wrath’ in reverse:”

The Los Angeles Times published some really devastating unemployment numbers today – not only is unemployment rising in the California generally, but in 8 of the Golden State’s counties, the rate is above 20%:

New county-by-county figures released by the state Wednesday showed that in eight counties, more than 1 in 5 people were out of work. Moreover, revised numbers for last year show that fewer people were employed than was previously believed.

The state was one of five, along with Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina, that reached their highest unemployment rates since the government began keeping track in 1976, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. California’s was 12.5% in January, up from 12.3% in December.

[...]

Most counties were still struggling under the burden of joblessness, especially the eight counties where rates were higher than 20%. Merced County, for instance, had an unemployment rate of 21.7% in January, and Imperial County’s rate was 27.3%.

These numbers also got me thinking about the more triumphalist reports we’ve heard about how some states are bucking the scary unemployment trends that places like California are facing. Oklahoma was on my mind in particular. I remember when my cousin Penelope Trunk was plotting her family’s flight from their tiny tenement in Brooklyn’s Park Slope a couple of years ago, and we joked around about moving to Oklahoma City because the cost of living was so low there.

Turns out it’s not such a joke!

In fact, a lot of people are making this choice. The Tulsa World noted in December:

The state added 43,025 residents from July 2008 to July 2009, the largest annual increase this decade.

The annual increase also reverses the one-year dip when the population failed to increase more than it did the previous year.

Overall, the Census Bureau estimates the Oklahoma population was 3,687,050 in July 2009 compared to 3,644,025 in July 2008. The annual population increase was 39,780 in 2007 and 34,238 in 2008.

Most of the overall population increase was fueled by persons moving to Oklahoma from other states, defined as domestic migration.

Domestic migration accounted for 18,345 new residents to the state with international migrants accounting for 5,340 additional people.

It’s not quite gangbusters, but it shows that the state known more for the Dust Bowl than for economic opportunity has turned itself around in a lot of ways. The Oklahoman’s crack Database Editor Paul Monies put together some visualizations of the differences in population between the Oklahoma of the Great Depression and the the Oklahoma of the Great Recession. His newspaper went on some months later to reflect triumphantly in an editorial:

Time was when Oklahomans fled to California in great numbers, so much so that the Golden State tried to put a stop to it. Now Californians are moving east; some of them are landing in Oklahoma. Cox says that in every year during the 2000s, Oklahoma gained net domestic migrants from California.

So I guess it’s like The Grapes of Wrath in reverse. The Joads have spent a few generations in California and may be wondering if they left a little too much behind on that dusty farmland that their Okie forebears squatted. And with more than 1 in 4 people jobless in Imperial, the county that abuts San Diego County in southern California, the ones going east to destinations like Oklahoma City just might be making the right bet.

Socialism: if you build it, they will leave.

(H/T: IP)

At the Weekly Standard, John McCormack write that Robert Gibbs claims, as McCormack puts it, “The Cornhusker Kickback Bill Will be ‘Law of the Land’ in 7 Days:”

The Hill reports:

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the healthcare bill will pass by next weekend.

“We’ll have the votes when the House votes, I think, within the next week,” Gibbs said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Gibbs added that those on next week’s Sunday talk shows “will be talking about healthcare not as a presidential proposal but I think as the law of the land.”

Gibbs is making clear that the vote House Democrats face next weekend is whether or not to make the Senate bill–with its tax on union health care plans and special deals for Nebraska, Florida, and Louisiana–”law of the land.” And then why would the Senate need to pass reconciliation fixes when its own national health care bill is already “law of the land”? Is this the message the White House wants to be sending to wavering House Democrats–that the Senate’s monstrosity will become law of the land and additional changes through reconciliation will just be icing on the cake?

Meanwhile, it looks like Gibbs’s prediction may be some high-level bluster. Majority Whip Jim Clyburn says that as of today they don’t have the votes.

More long-term, strategic bluster spotted from David Axelrod, along with a response from Moe Lane.

Update: Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) on his Facebook page: “Did you know: No official estimate of costs yet for beefed up role for IRS or HHS under HC bill?”

If you missed it on Sirius-XM this weekend, the latest edition of PJM Political is now online:

Join host Steve Green of VodkaPundit.com for a snapshot of Washington and beyond:

• Five questions for James Lileks, just back from touring the Caribbean with Hugh Hewitt.
• PJTV’s Trifecta on Eric Massa (D-NY), just back from touring the DC showers with Rahm Emanuel, featuring Bill Whittle, Scott Ott and Steve.
• Steve and Ed Discuss what’s next for ObamaCare, and how it could play out in the fall Congressional races.
• Taken from his weekly Instavision series on PJTV.com, Glenn Reynolds is joined by his wife, Dr. Helen Smith, for a rare joint interview, with Walter Sinott Armstrong of Duke University. Will neuroscience become our judge, jury, and executioner? Think of it as Tech, Lies, & Videotape…
• From PJTV’s Poliwood, Pajamas Media CEO Roger L. Simon, and Lionel Chetwynd, his fellow Academy Award-winning screenwriter, explore what The Hurt Locker directed by Kathryn Bigelow, and Sandra Bullock’s win for The Blind Side at last week’s Oscars says about Hollywood.
• In a move seemingly ripped from the pages of an Ayn Rand novel, the University of Tennessee flatters Al Gore and itself by presenting Gore with an honorary doctorate in ecology and evolutionary biology. PJTV.com’s Allen Barton, Terry Jones of Investor’s Business Daily, and Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Center discuss.
• Produced by your humble Blogospheric narrator and raider of Tom Wolfe-inspired headlines.

Click here to listen!

In a Vanity Fair piece titled “Hate Sells”, Matt Pressman explains “Why Liberal Magazines Are Suffering Under Obama:”

The George W. Bush years were good for more than just oilfield-services companies and waterboard manufacturers. They were also a boon for liberal political magazines, whose circulation soared on the wings of the Bush hatred that swept much of the country. The paid circulation (subscriptions plus newsstand sales) of The Nation nearly doubled from 2001 to 2005, that of Mother Jones rose by 37 percent, and that of Harper’s Magazine by 7 percent.So how have those magazines fared now that they don’t have W to kick around anymore? And have their ideological opposites on the newsstand enjoyed a boost from the anti-government, tea party-led fervor that has taken off since President Obama’s inauguration? I crunched the numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) and BPA Worldwide in order to find out.

The year 2009 was a tough one for magazines in general, with circulation down 2.23 percent overall, according to ABC (the decline in advertising revenue was far greater and more detrimental, but that’s another story). The three leading liberal political magazines, however, fared particularly badly. The Nation’s circulation in 2009 was down 7.4 percent from 2008, Mother Jones was down 6.7 percent, and Harper’s was down 5 percent.

Of course, there was another magazine that proudly wore its Bush-bashing politics on its well-tailored sleeves during most of the previous decade, whose numbers Pressman overlooked. I wonder why?

Update: Related thoughts from Mark Finkelstein.

As Benjamin Franklin has been quoted as saying at the time of America’s founding, he helped create “A republic, sir, if you can keep it.”

Which should be until, oh about sometime next week or so, when it’s Slaughtertime:

Via the Right Scoop, a tribute to the Madisonian genius who decided that Bill A — which would affect one-sixth of the American economy — can be “deemed” passed without a separate vote if Bill B is pushed through. So byzantine has the procedural framework become that I’m not sure if Pelosi’s still planning on using it. I thought not when I read Ed’s post earlier, but what about this bit from Politico on the Dems’ meeting this morning?

In addition, it looks like House Democrats won’t have to vote directly on a Senate bill they really don’t like. The speaker hasn’t made a final decision, but she told her rank-and-file during the meeting that the plan now is to craft a rule that would “deem” the Senate bill passed once they approve the package of fixes.

Apparently they are going to use it, albeit with the knowledge that Obama can only sign (and must sign) the underlying Senate bill, not the “fix,” before Reid proceeds to reconciliation. Which means that, for probably the first time in U.S. history, the president will be signing into law a bill that never received its own vote on the House floor. The “what if a Republican did it?” meme is overused, but clear your mind and try to imagine the media reaction if the Frist/Hastert Congress tried something like this for, oh, say, social security reform. If ever you’re tempted to agree with idiots on the left who think the press is balanced, let that thought experiment be your corrective.

Or as the Wall Street Journal dubs it, “ObamaCare — The Worst Deal of All Time.”

From Reason magazine’s “Five Lies About the American Economy”, subtitled, “The Obama team’s favorite slices of fiscal baloney:”

2. “No one wants banks making the kinds of risky loans that got us into this situation in the first place.”

President Obama made this claim following a December meeting with big bank officials, then contradicted himself by urging bankers to take “third and fourth” looks at rejected business loan applications. But the administration has been even more enthusiastic about encouraging another type of credit: the precise risky loans that got us into this situation in the first place.

Mortgage lending standards have declined, and the amount of risky debt taxpayers are underwriting has rapidly increased, under Obama’s guidance. A 2009 audit found that the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) was failing to vet lenders, ignoring missing borrower documentation, and declining to consider negative information prior to guaranteeing loans. More important, the FHA still guarantees mortgages with a minimum down payment of only 3.5 percent, despite abundant evidence that a borrower with low equity is more likely to default than any other type of borrower. (See Lie No. 3.) Defaults on government-approved loans continue to rise, as do redefaults on mortgages refinanced under HAMP.

Undaunted, the administration wants to give unpromising borrowers greater access to debt. At press time, the Treasury Department was considering allowing borrowers to get HAMP modifications by using only pay stubs, rather than tax records, to prove their financial status.

Of course, no one wanted “banks making the kinds of risky loans that got us into this situation in the first place”, other than Democrats themselves:

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Related: “‘No false claim left behind’ is the perfect summation of President Obama’s last-gasp push for a bill that hasn’t even been written. No matter details or cost, it’ll cure whatever ails you and America.”

The key word being “Nearly” of course. Here’s Jennifer Rubin on where the procedural shell games currently stand:

For a week or so now, Republicans and the conservative media have been hammering away on a procedural point, which is, in fact, vital to the whole reconcilition gambit being pushed by the Obama-Reid-Pelosi troika: the president will have a bill to sign once the House passes the Senate version, making any reconciliation process irrelevant and potentially moot if the Democrats then declare “victory” and end the process. Today the senate parliamentarian agreed:

The Senate Parliamentarian has ruled that President Barack Obama must sign Congress’ original health care reform bill before the Senate can act on a companion reconciliation package, senior GOP sources said Thursday.The Senate Parliamentarian’s Office was responding to questions posed by the Republican leadership. The answers were provided verbally, sources said.

So there you have it, House Democrats. Once you vote for the Senate bill, Obama will sign it, the Left will declare victory, and who knows if reconcilliation will ever happen. This confirms that the Democratic leadership has once again been hiding the ball and not leveling with either their own members or with the public about the procedural aspects of the bill. It will certainly not help to calm the nerves of House Democrats, who already suspect the “fix” is in and that they are being trapped into voting for the noxious Senate bill — Cornhusker Kickback and all.

John Hawkins asks, is today “The Day Health Care Reform Finally Died?” Allahpundit says, don’t be so sure.

Update: “They don’t have the votes right now, but they’re creating the vehicle so that they can airdrop in whatever changes they want.”

Update: “Democratic leaders should be asking themselves just how they have gotten to the point that their strategy is to amend a law that doesn’t exist yet by passing a bill without voting on it. Surely it’s time to start over.”

As Tim Blair writes, “Real or fake? Who cares:”

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Though given who the manufacturer is, Al Gore may be reaching for the smelling salts.

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Steven Crowder’s great video from late last year vividly illustrated Detroit’s wretched conditions after being ravaged by a half-century of continuous liberal economic “stimulus.” At the New Ledger today, Ben Domenech writes that it’s necessary to nuke the city in order to save it. Perhaps this is a foreshadowing of the rest of the nation’s fate in the years to come, after the Obama administration’s domestic war is concluded:

In March of last year, I posed the admittedly radical question: is there anything worth saving in Detroit? Wouldn’t the city where sirens never sleep be better off if we just burned it to the ground and started afresh? Dubbing it “urban policy chemo,” I got some significant pushback from some corners of the internet.

The best help to Michigan’s economic woes might come from razing much of the Motor City… This is beyond broken windows theories — we’re talking about broken houses, buildings, skyscrapers; an entire broken community, economy and polity.

Now, the Mayor of Detroit himself has come around to my view — and the views of professional urban policy experts. The city, facing $300 million in deficits and an unemployment rate approaching 50%, can no longer afford to patrol the husks of the city. His plan: bulldoze roughly a quarter of the buildings.

“Things that were unthinkable are now becoming thinkable,” said James W. Hughes, dean of the School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, who is among the urban experts watching the experiment with interest. “There is now a realization that past glories are never going to be recaptured. Some people probably don’t accept that, but that is the reality.”

I have to applaud Mayor Dave Bing, son of Northeast Washington, for making this decision, which has to cost some significant political capital and destroyed any illusions about an easy path to revitalization. But the point is, spending less than $30 million in federal funds to tear things down and start afresh is the only way to have any hope of a comeback. One-third of Detroit’s lots are vacant anyway.

Those can bombed back into the agrarian age.

Related: Monica Conyers, former Detroit councilwoman, viral video star and wife of Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) gets 37 months for bribery. No word yet if Rep. Conyers will order his wife to undergo self-impeachment.