Iberiabank to Uncle Sam: Thanks but no thanks

The first of what may be a trend (CNN):

Iberiabank Corp. became the first bank to pull out of the government’s bailout program Friday, saying it would be returning the $90 million it received from the government in early December under the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

. . .

TARP has helped provide stability to the banking system overall but recent changes would put IBERIA (IBKC) at a disadvantage, said Daryl Byrd, the bank’s chief executive.

“We believe recent actions, interpretations, and commentary regarding various aspects of the program places our company at an unacceptable competitive disadvantage,” said Byrd in a statement.

What aspects, you ask?  Why, having Geithner et al tell them how to run their bank (same link, emphasis added):

Due to highly publicized losses at larger institutions such as Citigroup (C, Fortune 500) and Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500), Congress has tightened restrictions on recipients of TARP funding, noted Andy Stapp, senior analyst with investment research firm B. Riley & Co.

“A lot of these small-cap banks remain profitable, and it just doesn’t make much sense for the government to try to dictate the way they should operate their business,” said Stapp, adding “I think you’ll see more banks returning TARP money.”

Kudos to Iberiabank for recognizing – and reminding the rest of us – that there is no such thing as government help without strings attached.

Whiplash we can believe in

After announcing to the world that the United States will participate in the “Durban II” Israel-bashing “anti-racism” conference (reversing a Bush Administration decision not to take part), the president has discovered that the conference’s critics had a point after all (Politico, h/t Jim Geraghty):

White House aides told Jewish leaders on a conference call today that the United States will boycott the United Nations’ World Conference on Racism over hostility to Israel in draft documents prepared for the April conference.

We await the left’s reaction . . .

How long before the President caves into his base on Afghanistan?

ABC News (h/t Jim Geraghty) has a new poll showing only 50% of Americans believe Afghanistan is worth winning. You read that right: Afghanistan.  Here are the details:

In this ABC/Post poll, Americans divide by 50-47 percent on whether the conflict in Afghanistan was worth fighting, with the negative view at a new high in ABC/Post polls. Support for the war doubles among Republicans, 74 percent, compared with Democrats, 36 percent.

There’s also a 50-41 percent division on whether winning in Afghanistan is necessary for the broader war on terrorism to be a success, with a similar broad partisan gap – 75 percent of Republicans say yes; four in 10 Democrats agree.

Almost two years ago, I made my case why I felt a Democrat in the White House would withdraw from Afghanistan.  If anything, the numbers (in terms of American support) are worse since then.  The only thing keeping Afghanistan from becoming as divisive as Iraq used to be is that Democrats aren\’t yet willing to challenge the president (who authorized 17,000 more troops sent there).

If the president maintains his resolve, he is to be commended.  But will he?  Will he choose to lead the nation in continuing a war that he hardly ever chooses to discuss?  A war that barely a third of Democrats support?  A war that has even Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper – arguably the most conservative government leader on the planet – looking for an out in 2011?

I don’t think he will.  I hope I’m wrong; I hope I’ve been wrong for the past two years, but I fear I’ll be proven right.

The recovery continues

There is still plenty of doom and gloom in cernter-right circles these days, with more than a few wondering if the Republican Party will ever get its act together (New Majority and Below the Beltway are the loudest voices I’ve heard – and I don’t mean that negatively).  For pundits across the spectrum, the idea of 2010 being like 1994 is laughable.

They tend to forget the world as it was in 1993.

As hard as this is to believe right now, Bill Clinton was riding high in the spring of that year.  His budget plan (the five-year one) sailed through Congress over weak Republican opposition.  Despite some stumbles (his own stimulus plan being the lead one), he had the American people behind him, a friendly Congress, and an ambitious agenda firmly left of center.

Then Congress took up his first actual budget, and the Republicans quickly started picking it apart.  While we all tend to remember Newt Gingrich’s role in the GOP recovery, the far more important figure in it all was Bob Michel – the actual House GOP leader at the time.  He could have easily swatted Newt down if he wanted, or at the very least kept him at arms length.  Instead, he made Newt’s anti-Clinton agenda his own, and brought to it a charm and sense of humor no Republican in Washington could match.  Meanwhile, the press used the summer of 1993 to get over its Clinton swoon and started asking harder questions of the Administration.

Clinton did get his budget (and tax increases) passed, but with no votes to spare in either House – and no Republican support (forget Arlen Specter, even Jim Jeffords voted against it).  The Republicans pulled a surprise sweep in the elections of 1993, and the rest is history (well, sort of, but 1994 is for another post).

My point is this: recoveries never look certain, or even existant, until they’ve been completed.  Looking back, the 2005 elections should have been a clear warning to the GOP, but Mike Bloomberg’s landslide in New York jammed the signal.  Even in 1994, the idea of Republicans winning control of Congress was a pipe dream (or a nightmare, depending on one’s politics) until a July Gallup Poll put the GOP in front on the generic Congressional ballot for the first time in 40 years.

So what is the Washington GOP doing in response to their first show of unity on the Obamnibus?  Having already taken pleasure in what they did right, they’re moving to fix what they did wrong (Byron York - DC Examiner):

During the stimulus debate, the strategist argued, Republicans had an actual alternative but were unable to direct much attention to it — in part because they were focusing so much of their rhetoric on the massive and unnecessary spending in the bill.  The debate became a question of an up-or-down decision on the Obama/Democratic plan — not a choice between the Obama/Democratic plan and a Republican plan.  “The coverage of the stimulus bill focused on the difference between the House and Senate versions,” the strategist told me, “which were basically two sides of the same coin.”  The Republican role was limited to a) saying no to the Obama/Democratic bill, and b) having three moderates in the Senate approve of the bill as long as it offered a little less than what Democrats proposed.  The idea that Republicans, mostly in the House, had an actual full-scale alternative, was lost. “On the Sunday talk shows, right after it passed, find me one person who mentioned the Republican alternative,” the strategist said.

This is an excellent point; not even yours truly pushed the GOP alternative, and I knew it existed.  This is something we bloggers need to keep in mind, too.

Meanwhile, the president’s claim of saving a trillion dollars over ten years has already been given the “funny money” label, and not by a blogger or Republican politician, but an unnamed reporter (NRO – The Corner).

So sure, 2009 looks dark right now, but again, so did 1993 at this point – and back then, the GOP had not only a Bush spending spree to live down, but a Bush tax increase, too.

FWIW, even Doug at BTB is noticing.

The market reacts to the Obama speech (UPDATED AND BUMPED) . . .

. . . by falling more than 100 points.

UPDATE: As of 12:27PM, it’s off 150.

UPDATE #2: Bit of a bounceback as of 1:05PM, still off 100+.

UPDATE #3: Bounceback strengthens as money moves away from bond market (record float of 5-year notes driving down bond prices – Market Watch).  Dow off 50 as of 2:03PM.

UPDATE #4: Never mind, we’re back in three-digit-loss territory as of 2:21PM.

UPDATE #5: Bonds swoon deeper, dollars flee to stocks, the Dow approaches break-even as of 3:03PM.

UPDATE #6: Ouch! Not even a bond sell-off and Geither’s bank “stress test” could save the market. Dow loses over 100 points in the last half-hour to close at -80 for the day.  NASDAQ and S&P also lose 1%+.

So much for the consenus on “climate change”

Leading Japanese scientists – in the climate field – give the “consensus” view on “global warming” the rhetorical double-barrel (Register, UK, h/t Small Dead Animals):

Japanese scientists have made a dramatic break with the UN and Western-backed hypothesis of climate change in a new report from its Energy Commission.

Three of the five researchers disagree with the UN’s IPCC view that recent warming is primarily the consequence of man-made industrial emissions of greenhouse gases. Remarkably, the subtle and nuanced language typical in such reports has been set aside.

One of the five contributors compares computer climate modelling to ancient astrology. Others castigate the paucity of the US ground temperature data set used to support the hypothesis, and declare that the unambiguous warming trend from the mid-part of the 20th Century has ceased.

The “astrology” fellow’s view is detailed later in the story (emphasis added):

Kanya Kusano is Program Director and Group Leader for the Earth Simulator at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science & Technology (JAMSTEC). He focuses on the immaturity of simulation work cited in support of the theory of anthropogenic climate change. Using undiplomatic language, Kusano compares them to ancient astrology. After listing many faults, and the IPCC’s own conclusion that natural causes of climate are poorly understood, Kusano concludes:

“[The IPCC's] conclusion that from now on atmospheric temperatures are likely to show a continuous, monotonous increase, should be perceived as an unprovable hypothesis,” he writes.

Ouch!

Another contributor (Shunichi Akasofu: Founding Director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks) notes that the “warming” since 2001 “halted. Despite this, CO2 emissions are still increasing.”

Somebody better tell Reid Buckley.

Well, that explains a few things

Fox 5 DC is reporting that Jim Bowden is under federal investigation for skimming signing bonuses from Dominican Republic players (no, not that Jim Bowden, Nationals’ GM Jim Bowden).  According to Fox 5, Bowden and/or his assistant Jose Rijo may have skimmed hundreds of thousands of dollars that were supposed to go to prospects as signing bonuses.

WJLA (DC Channel 7) has it, too:

SportsIllustrated.com is reporting the FBI (web) is investigating Jim Bowden, the Nationals’ general manager, for allegedly skimming on signing bonuses for prospects from the Dominican Republic.

Of course, no one knows what really happened – yet – but this could explain what happened to the Nationals’ farm system in recent years.

Obama announces tax increase, and the market tanks (UPDATED)

The Obama Administration leaked its plan to raise taxes over the weekend (Washington Post, emphasis added):

Obama also seeks to increase tax collections, mainly by making good on his promise to eliminate some of the temporary tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003. While the budget would keep the breaks that benefit middle-income families, it would eliminate them for wealthy taxpayers, defined as families earning more than $250,000 a year. Those tax breaks would be permitted to expire on schedule in 2011. That means the top tax rate would rise from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, the tax on capital gains would jump to 20 percent from 15 percent for wealthy filers and the tax on estates worth more than $3.5 million would be maintained at the current rate of 45 percent.

Obama also proposes “a fairly aggressive effort on tax enforcement” that would target corporate loopholes, the official said. And Obama’s budget seeks to tax the earnings of hedge fund managers as normal income rather than at the lower 15 percent capital gains rate.

Right on cue, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Standard & Poors 500 Index both stand poised to close at lows not seen since 1997.

The only real surprise is that this would surprise people.

UPDATE: The markets have just closed; Dow and S&P did close at their lowest level since 1997.

FURTHER UPDATE: CNN has the details (emphasis added):

The Dow and S&P 500 tumbled to levels not seen in nearly 12 years Monday, as investors continue to worry that the government’s efforts to slow the recession won’t be sufficient.

The Dow Jones industrial average (INDU) lost 250 points, or 3.4%, according to early tallies., ending at the lowest point since May 7, 1997.

The S&P 500 (SPX) index lost 26 points, or 3.5%, ending at the lowest point since April 11, 1997.

Looking back (thanks to Jim Geraghty), the Dow has lost 2,500 points since Obama was elected, and nearly 1,000 since the inauguration.

Marc Fisher: a man confused

This is how Marc Fisher (Washington Post) described Bob McDonnell:

. . . a hard-core social conservative who was groomed for politics at the Rev. Pat Robertson’s Regent University law school, a man who has spent most of his adult life in Hampton Roads and Richmond, a clean-cut fellow with a military bearing and an unabashed conviction that he can become Virginia’s next governor by pushing hard on many of the same issues that have sent his party to defeat again and again in recent years.

Three paragraphs later, Fisher says this about – Bob McDonnell:

. . . he’s focusing more on transportation and health care than on the guns, gays and God hot-button issues Republicans have tried to ride to Richmond in the past decade.

Huh?  Which is it, Marc?

Reid Buckley: how can a man of the right get so much wrong?

Ever since the blogosphere began, its existence and effects on the way we live – or, to be specific, the way we choose our leaders and decide our policies – has been the subject of raging debate.  How informative are today’s blogs?  How much do they advance the debate?  How different would things be without them?  Do they have a future?

Strangely enough, we have stumbled upon an answer – courtesy of Reid Buckley.

Buckley is not happy with conservatism – as he sees it - and decided to left everyone know about it (the version I saw came courtesy of the Free Lance-Star).  Quite unintentionally, the piece is a perfect example of what happens to someone who does not pay attention to the blogosphere – on top of other mistakes that should really embarrass a Buckley.

Buckley tips his hand almost immediately in his first lament at the state of the right:

This is what I fear establishment thinking among conservatives is becoming. Dull. Derivative. Predictable. Lacking in zip and sting and mordancy–in the agenbite of inwit.

Well, the blogosphere specializes in “zip and sting,” so if that was his worry, than reassurance was just a few keystrokes away!

Of course, if this were the only thing Buckley was missing from the blogosphere, he probably wouldn’t have wasted so much ink.  So we must go on to his first glaring policy error:

For 40 years, smug, snide right-wingers have made merry mocking Greenpeace fanatics and ecological doomsayers without learning a blessed thing about the precariousness of the ecology and the effect of human action (not to speak of avarice) on it, as when we promiscuously exfoliate the rain forests or condemn yet one more green acre on the southeastern shore of New Jersey to the desolation of heedless urban development.

We conservatives are so self-satisfied that we have incapacitated ourselves from peering beneath the wild exaggerations of scruffy environmentalist kooks to the gathering of real dangers. The climate is most probably changing, and the human impact on it should be studied.

So Buckley has fallen, head over heels, for the ol’ climate change “consensus,” which exists just about everywhere except where it’s supposed to exist – among climatologists and meteorologists.  Had Buckley simply taken the time to look over Watts Up With That, he would have seen dedicated experts in the field – seeking only the truth that unbiased data can provide – demolishing the “consensus.”  What Anthony Watts has found (satellite failures compromising sea ice data, temperature sensors affected by local heat pockets, and Dr. James Hansen’s former boss declaring himself a skeptic) has completely reshaped the debate on “climate change” – for those who have seen it.  Clearly, Buckley hasn’t.

Buckley then falls head-over-heels into his Greenpeace-like nonsense with a rant that would make his brother (William F.) spin in his grave:

Have you flown recently from Newport News to Boston at 25,000 feet on a clear day and gazed down upon the horror of American civilization? What man hath wrought! What we have done to this beautiful land? Dear God, forgive us! But when last did you hear a conservative oppose a new mall because it is ugly, accustoming thousands of human beings to dehumanizing blows against the aesthetic sense until it is benumbed?

The good, the true, and the beautiful are inseparably joined. One cannot damage one without doing harm to the others.

Such lines will find great currency in America today – except for those with any knowledge of its history.  In fact, I myself was immediately drawn to Daniel Walker Howe’s What God Hath Wrought (which I foolishly passed up for a horribly-written biography of General George Thomas).  Howe wrote of a period of profound, dramatic, and, for many, frightening change: the period from 1815 to 1848.  Only someone with little or no knowledge of the Industrial Revolution or the Gilded Age would be so aghast at the rise of the suburbs.

It reminds me of a local discussion we had in Spotsylvania on building design standards, in which some of the planning staff praised commercial buildings based on “historical” Queen Anne architecture.  The staff apparently had no idea that at its height, Queen Anne was considered one of the most garish and ostentatious styles in the history of architecture.  The reaction against it lasted for decades.  Yet now, merely because it is old, it is wonderful.

Edmund Burke never had such a simplistic view of conservative thought.  No one did.  It was exactly this sort of silliness that led Whittaker Chambers to utter the famous phrase that I cite on the masthead, and led me name this blog as I have.

Yet it is in his final few paragraphs the Buckley makes abundantly clear just how far the world has passed him by.  Again, a few trips in the blogosphere can easily cure him of this.  For example, check out his comments on the events of the last few months:

Republicans have submitted to the takeover of the economy by the federal government, a foray into the corporate state from which we may never recover. Yet to my knowledge no conservative voice has articulated the ringing indictment that such highhanded action merits, and the American people have submitted meekly.

No conservative voice?  Doesn’t Leslie Carbone count?  What about Jim Bowden?  Norm Leahy?  There were plenty of voices screaming bloody murder about the Treasury Department’s foray into, well, everything.  As for the American people, it should be noted that John McCain actually led Barack Obama until Lehman Brothers went under.  From that point, McCain was swept up in the very panic Buckley laments, and the American people abandoned him.

Finally, Buckley reveals his complete ignorance of the current political landscape with this drivel:

Yet no conservative voice was raised to bring up first principles by showing why Social Security, et al. are inimical to the rationale for republican government and must be phased out or subjected to radical reform. Many conservative voices have written scathingly about the financial woes of the present Social Security administration, but to my knowledge none has yet proposed that Republicans abandon the New Deal-era concept all together.

Has Buckley not heard of Amity Shlaes?  Has Michael Barone eluded his eye for this long?  Only if he (Buckley) has been exclusively getting his news from dead trees and the boob tube.

In short, Buckley’s pining for the past (and not a realistic past either) has left him completely blinded to the actual present.  The year 2009 is the first in eighty years in which the elite is not in consensus about the New Deal and/or the wisdom of government intervention in the economy (Herbert Hoover’s actual role as an interventionist is finally getting attention).  The Republican Party, bereft of power but liberated from the Bush Administration, has rediscovered its limited government roots with surprising speed.

Yet Reid Buckley can’t see any of it.  He is the archetype of an analog conservative in a digital age.