Gesundheit! That’s to say ‘bless you’ or ‘may you have good health’. Is hatred as cathartic as sneezing? That explanation may not satisfy Leon Wieseltier, who spends a lot of elegant and erudite prose in the New Republic trying to understand why Andrew Sullivan’s seems to hate Jews lately. But generic hate is good enough explanation for Dan Riehl, who advises Wieseltier to relax because Sullivan hates everybody. Sullivan, he says, is a hater. It doesn’t matter who he hates, just so there’s something. The Jews are just the flavor of the month. But don’t worry, Riehl says, wait long enough and it will be everybody’s turn; and in the end Sullivan might even finish up hating himself.

That makes Sullivan uniquely enlightened in his own way. Most of us are partisan haters. He might be an equal opportunity one. One wag advised the world to “end discrimination, hate everybody”. That view has more merit than one would think. Sociologists have theorized that both beneficence and hate have their roots in group competition. They argue that solidarity is the emotional glue that binds groups together in the struggle for scarce resources. Hate is the complementary emotion; it is the shared feeling reserved for those who don’t belong — to the other — the enemy. If solidarity binds a group together, hatred animates it to face outward against the foe. If Sullivan as Riehl believes, hates everybody, it’s only because he is alienated from everyone, the lone wolf flitting from pack to pack.

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Jay Cost has a wonderful article at Real Clear Politics arguing that President Obama’s failure to make major policy changes arises not from the fact that “America is ungovernable” but because President Obama “has simply not been up to the job.” Cost believes Obama made two major mistakes, one strategic and the second tactical.

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Years ago I lived near a drinking establishment on the boundary of Quezon City and Manila where people essentially killed each other over nothing. The place in question was a really a roofed parking lot that had been converted to a beer garden. It was frequented by off duty policemen, enlisted men and petty criminals. The clientele, plus the combination of strong waters and waitresses ensured that every now and again a shooting broke out essentially for no reason at all. One drunken man might look across the room and lock glances with a similar stare from a similarly unlovely face. Dagger looks would be exchanged and guns would flare in the dark. Another day, another corpse at the beer garden.

But now things have gotten out of hand. The New York Times reports that karaoke has been added to the deadly mix. A series of murders in General Santos City has been attributed to customer rage at hearing yet another cracked rendition of  Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”. The NYT quotes a karaoke bar patron who says, “I used to like ‘My Way,’ but after all the trouble, I stopped singing it,” he said. “You can get killed.”  That’s right boys. It’s a One Way Ticket to the Blues. The Times describes the travails of a Mindanao barber.

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There were fears that a tide of lending by Chinese banks to keep the economy going was building up a “bubble” of uncertain proportions. Beijing-based Fitch Ratings said that it was difficult to estimate just how large the bad debts were because the Chinese banking system was so opaque. One party trying to peer into China’s economic future was Japan. At the recent G7 conference in the artic city of Iqaluit, Japanese Finance Minister Naoto Kan said Japan is “paying attention to China’s economic conditions, and we’re concerned about [signs of] a bubble” in the mainland’s economy. Fitch Ratings were quoted as saying that:

“The agency views ‘bubble risk’ as greatest for Chinese banks given their 32 percent loan growth in 2009; this looks likely to be followed by a further 20 percent in 2010,” Fitch said in a statement.

“Credit growth of more than 50 percent over a two-year period in an economy where bank credit is already quite large relative to gross domestic product almost inevitably involves some misallocation of credit,” it added.

New loans extended by China’s banks nearly doubled in 2009 from the previous year to 9.6 trillion yuan (1.4 trillion dollars) as banks heeded Beijing’s calls to pump up lending to keep the economy growing.

Fitch however noted the limited transparency of Chinese banks and said their tendency to reschedule loans meant any bad debt problems would surface slowly.

CNN’s Katie Brenner quotes a number of academic authorities who claim that even if a Chinese bubble popped its effects would be speedily managed by an authoritarian Communist Party which is far better than the West at managing such crises — or so the experts said. Beijing can prevent capital flight by draconian control; prices can simply be set by fiat, banks can be forced to extend credit whether they like it or not.

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The Washington Post’s Charles Lane describes Barack Obama’s rejection of Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln’s plea to move to the center in order to avoid an electoral catastrophe in November. Obama told Lincoln he was going forward — a strategy Lane ascribes to Obama’s political consultant David Plouffe. “Obama’s reply, in a nutshell: Sorry, Blanche. … But the president is not only against a centrist shift on policy grounds; he also thinks it is a political loser:” The President told Lincoln that the best way to win was product differentiation.

If our response ends up being, you know, because we don’t want to — we don’t want to stir things up here, we’re just going to do the same thing that was being done before, then I don’t know what differentiates us from the other guys. And I don’t know why people would say, boy, we really want to make sure that those Democrats are in Washington fighting for us.

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Fears that Southern Europe could not maintain fiscal discipline has caused the Euro to plummet and sparked market losses worldwide. News of a Portuguese defeat of a proposed austerity measure, added to reports that Greece is balking at measures which can plug a hole twice the size of the Lehman Brothers abyss and reluctance in Spain to cutting public spending have convinced some investors to conclude that the belt will never be tightened enough.

The VOA describes the situation: “Some analysts predict Greece could be pushed out of the bloc. Also unclear is whether the Greek government will have the political will to carry out the painful fiscal measures it promised — particularly if they spark protests. Spain also faces potential social unrest over its austerity measures. And in Portugal, the parliament on Friday voted down the government’s austerity plan.”  But the real worry was Spain. Neither the collapse of Greece nor Portugal could seriously threaten the Eurozone, but Spain’s much bigger economy could. The Wall Street Journal describes the scenario that has caused the market to fall:  a weak Europe stalls the global recovery and leads to a fall in commodities.  Like an airplane which has lost lift, someone, somewhere has got to get enough airflow over the wings to get the thing flying again. But how? (more…)

One of the standard reasons advanced whenever a terrorist attack occurs is that the Islamic world “hates us” for some reason or the other. An far simpler and more direct explanation is that terrorist attacks are fueled by their sympathizers in the West. They attack the West because they are given the tools to do so.  Christian Caryl in Foreign Policy describes this process in great detail in his article Londonistan. Caryl asks how the UK became what Nigerian Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka described as a “cesspit” of Islamic radicalization. Soyinka accused Britain of harboring, in its arrogance, all kinds of venomous intellectual pets which it felt free to unleash upon lesser breeds without their Law of Accomodativeness.

“England is a cesspit. England is the breeding ground of fundamentalist ­Muslims. Its social logic is to allow all religions to preach openly. But this is illogic, because none of the other religions preach apocalyptic violence. … “This is part of the character of Great Britain. Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort of imperial adventure, that arrogance gives way to a feeling of accommodativeness.”

Caryl’s answer is more prosaic. He argues that Britain is a cesspit because that’s where the money is: in the form of grants, the dole and celebrity. It’s a extremist-friendly place so Islamic extremists go there and learn all kinds of radical things. No mystery at all.

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The TARP Inspector General’s report is out. The following is a verbatim extract from the executive summary. The penultimate paragraph of the summary states that the financial danger is not past. If anything it has gotten worse.  Reflecting on what lasting change TARP has brought to the economy, the report said:

Stated another way, even if TARP saved our financial system from driving off a cliff back in 2008, absent meaningful reform, we are still driving on the same winding mountain road, but this time in a faster car.

The good news is that things will go just swimmingly  … until we reach the next hairpin bend.  The rest of the excerpt follows.

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Protesters have “demand(ed) an end to the Greece’s financial crisis” as the Greek government prepared to cut down on public spending. It had previously taken advantage of its EU membership to run up unparalleled deficits and borrow money on a monumental scale to increase its public spending, while concealing the true nature of its condition from EU inspectors. With the EU unwilling to assure any further bailouts the Greek government is under pressure to cut public spending and the protesters don’t like it. Just end the crisis already, they urged.

“It is a simple issue of survival,” the newspaper quoted Anna Tsounara, a protester as saying. “… I have never demonstrated like this before but now I want answers. All of us here worked in the public sector on contracts for years and now we are told the state is bankrupt by a government that comes in and says it wants to get rid of us. Just like that. That’s not fair,” the protester added. …
The country’s leftist government under Prime Minister George Papandreou, only in power for three months, faces the colossal task of carrying out reform programs to eradicate problems of corruption and politics standing in the way of economic growth.

He has reportedly warned of the country’s “sinking” as a result of bad public finances unless changes are made.

“People are puzzled. They spent the best part of the last decade thinking ‘it’s over, we made it, we’re rich’ and then suddenly they’re told the country’s bankrupt. Like the past conservative government, many bought into the illusion that borrowing was OK. And now they, too, are weighed down by debt,” Pavlos Tzimas, a political analyst told The Guardian.

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The AP says President Obama’s new budget would impose a host of tax increases, amounting in total to $1.4 trillion over the next decade. Taxvox calls it a “mind numbing budget” in which not only taxes but total debt will go up in absolute terms.

Next year, according to Obama’s fiscal plan, spending would increase to more than $3.8 trillion. Revenues would rise by two full percentage points of GDP to almost $2.6 trillion. Thus the deficit as a share of GDP would shrink to 8.3 percent. After that, matters would improve somewhat more (thanks in part to a growing economy) but the deficit would never fall below 3.6 percent of GDP. And still, the total debt held by the public would grow from an already-troubling 63 percent this year to 77 percent by 2020.

Where’s the money going to come from? More taxes on wealthy individuals and business, the proposal says. The WSJ writes that tax deductions will decrease and tax rates will increase for those who are deemed able to do more.

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