Ben Bernanke is Time's "Person of the Year"

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, a student of the Great Depression who has fought to avert another one, is Time magazine's "person of the year.''

It was Bernanke and then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson who were said to have sucked the oxygen from a room filled with congressional leaders on Capitol Hill when they met last year to explain the gravity of the credit crisis that was unfolding.

Bernanke has since won another term as Federal Reserve chairman, reappointed by President Obama. And now he's won a Time cover.

Time chose Bernanke over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Gen. Stanley McChyrstal, "the Chinese worker'' and many more.

Read the rest here.

I have a different honor in mind for the Federal Reserve Chairman. If we keep printing money as fast as they can load the paper and ink into the machines his face could adorn the $1 million dollar bill, which should cover the cost of a McDonalds double-cheeseburger and fries.

Howard Dean: Time to kill the bill (health care) and start over

WASHINGTON — Former Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean argued Wednesday that the health care overhaul bill taking shape in the Senate further empowers private insurers at the expense of consumer choice.

"You will be forced to buy insurance. If you don't, you'll pay a fine," said Dean, a physician. "It's an insurance company bailout." Interviewed on ABC's "Good Morning America," he said the bill has some good provisions, "but there has to be a line beyond which you think the bill is bad for the country."

"This is an insurance company's dream," the former Democratic presidential candidate said. "This is the Washington scramble, and it's a shame."

Read the rest here.

The political risks of success for health care reform

...If this legislation passes, Democrats will be held accountable for any failures or problems in the system. So if Americans' insurance premiums rise, they will blame the Democrats. If patients have to wait in line at emergency rooms, it will be seen as the Democrats' fault. If health-care costs don't drop, the Democrats will face the wrath of the electorate.

Many Democrats, including people in the administration, blame poor marketing for their difficulties in passing health reform. They say they haven't gotten the message out. But advocates of reform have spent millions on advertising and lobbying this year. And Obama, who many say is the best orator ever to occupy the White House, has pushed for this legislation constantly over the past six months. In that time, support for Obama's handling of health-care reform has dropped by more than a net of 30 points.

Yet before Republicans cheer that they may defeat this effort, they should beware what they wish for. A vast majority of Americans still believes that we need fundamental health-care reform. If the legislation fails, Democrats can blame Republicans by saying reform was in sight and the GOP blocked it without offering a real alternative to decrease costs and increase access.

The dominant issues today are the economy and jobs, and the public doesn't see either party making these a real priority. Further, polls show trust in government handling of domestic issues remains at historic lows. What most voters hear from Washington these days is squabbling over health reform involving a government role they don't trust and don't want.

Read the rest here.

Hear My Voice Oh God

The Republican Party is becoming "irrelevant" in California

Further evidence that the GOP is rapidly becoming the party of Wall Street bankers, the medical insurance cartel and Protestant Evangelicals. The party seems determined to repeat the mistakes of the Democrats in the 70's and 80's when they allowed their left wing to run the show condemning them to two decades in the political wilderness as their party became a minority in every region of the country outside of the left coast and the liberal North-East.

CLAREMONT, CALIF. -- A few facts reveal just how far the Republican Party has fallen in California.

A Republican hasn't carried the state in a presidential contest since 1988. The last time a California GOP candidate won a U.S. Senate election was in the same decade. Nowadays, Republicans' share of the state's registered voters has shrunk to 31 percent, a historic low.

"There are large parts of the state where the party is irrelevant," said Allan Hoffenblum, a well-known California political analyst who has been a campaign manager for Republicans in the state. "It's not even a statewide party, really."

But few stories better reflect the divisions and disarray among state Republicans than the saga of an obscure Southern California assemblyman.

He was unknown even by political junkies in the region until early this year. Then, with one vote, conservative Assembly member Anthony Adams became a symbol of California Republicans' chaos and destructive divisions. The story of the man who was once regarded as a loyal foot soldier exposed the toxic infighting that has come to define the party.

Now he became the latest straw dog in a fight much larger than anything about himself, an unlikely proxy in a broadening war for the heart of the Republican Party's, one engulfing Republicans nationwide. In New York, conservatives and more moderate party members fiercely contested a congressional seat that had drawn Sarah Palin into the fray on behalf of the party's right. Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a darling of conservatives, found himself in a political death match against fellow Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison, who had begun a primary challenge against him. The Adams skirmish was part of a pitched battle led by conservatives furious at those who, they thought, had not demonstrated loyalty to their principles.

When he cast an aye vote for Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2009-2010 state budget, which included about $12.5 billion in tax increases, Adams instantly became a pariah in conservative GOP circles -- targeted for political extinction.

Read the rest here.

Iran to try American hikers

LONDON — As tensions build between Washington and Tehran, the Iranian foreign minister said Monday that three Americans arrested in July after crossing the border from northern Iraq would be tried but did not specify the charges, according to news reports.

The minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, told a news conference in Tehran that the three had “entered Iran with suspicious aims. The judiciary will try them.”

Reuters quoted him as saying “relevant sentences” would be handed down.

Read the rest here.

Sentences are being contemplated before the trial? If the name were not in the story, that line would have narrowed the list of potential countries quite a bit. On a side note; while I feel badly for the families of these people I am compelled to ask why Americans keep behaving like morons by hiking or sailing near the territory of unfriendly countries? This sort of thing happens far too frequently and the US Government is then put on the spot and expected to clean up the mess somehow.

Prisons of Our Own Making

The below article from the NY Times is sufficiently impressive that I am going to quote it in its entirety.

If you’re a governor with presidential aspirations, you should never, under any circumstances, pardon a convict or reduce a sentence. That’s the lesson everyone seems to have drawn from the dreadful case of Maurice Clemmons, an Arkansas native who murdered four Lakewood, Wash., police officers over Thanksgiving weekend — nine years after Mike Huckabee, then governor, commuted his sentence and the Arkansas parole board set him free.

Even before Clemmons was shot dead the following Tuesday by Seattle police officers, a chorus of pundits had declared Huckabee’s presidential ambitions all but finished. His prospective 2012 rivals — Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty and Sarah Palin — hastened to suggest that they never considered issuing a pardon while governor. And even observers sympathetic to Huckabee’s decision (Clemmons’s original 108-year sentence was handed down when he was only 16, and for burglary and robbery, not murder) tended to emphasize its folly. Joe Carter, who handled rapid-response for Huckabee’s 2008 campaign, acknowledged that the “prudent tactic would have been to simply refuse to grant any leniency — ever.”

This calculus has recent American history as well as crude political logic on its side. Without conservative lawmakers willing to “err on the side of punishing” (as Palin put it after the Clemmons shooting), America might still be swamped by the crime wave that engulfed the country in the 1960s and ’70s.

The surge in crime rates, which lasted until the early 1990s, was driven by a variety of factors — the demographic bulge created by the baby boom, the crisis of authority in the late ’60s, and the heroin and crack epidemics that followed. But it was abetted by a softheaded liberalism that emphasized rehabilitation to the exclusion of retribution and deterrence. (Across the Great Society era, as crime rates started to take off, America’s prison population actually went down.)

The case of Willie Horton remains the exemplary instance of rehabilitative folly. In 1986, a furlough program in Michael Dukakis’s Massachusetts enabled Horton to commit rape and battery midway through what was supposed to be a life sentence for murder. Liberals remember the Horton story, which Republicans used to derail Dukakis’s presidential bid, as an example of right-wing race-bating. But they rarely recall the damning details — from Dukakis’s veto of a bill exempting first-degree murderers from furloughs (it would “cut the heart out of efforts at inmate rehabilitation,” he claimed), to the self-parodic way his administration responded to the tragedy. (“Don’t forget that Mr. Horton had nine previous successful furloughs,” Dukakis’s secretary of human services told the press.)

There are superficial resemblances, much cited in the last two weeks, between the Horton case and the tragic parole of Maurice Clemmons. But the political context is completely different. The age of furloughs is long gone. For a generation now, conservatives, not Dukakis-style liberals, have been making policy on crime. They’ve built more prisons, imposed harsher sentences and locked up as many lawbreakers as possible.

Their approach has worked. The violent crime rate has been cut by nearly 40 percent since its early-1990s peak. The murder rate is at its lowest point since Lyndon Johnson was president.

Yet the costs of this success have been significant: 2.3 million Americans are behind bars. Our prison system tolerates gross abuses, including rape on a disgraceful scale. Poor communities are warped by the absence of so many fathers and brothers. And every American community is burdened by the expense of building and staffing enough prisons to keep up with our swelling convict population.

Mass incarceration was a successful public-policy tourniquet. But now that we’ve stopped the bleeding, it can’t be a permanent solution.

This doesn’t require a return to the liberal excuse-making of the ’60s and ’70s. Nor does it require every governor to issue frequent pardons. (A capricious mercy doesn’t further the cause of justice.)

Instead, it requires a more sophisticated crime-fighting approach — an emphasis, for instance, on making sentences swifter and more certain, even as we make them shorter; a system of performance metrics for prisons and their administrators; a more stringent approach to probation and parole. (“When Brute Force Fails,” by the U.C.L.A. law professor Mark Kleiman, is the best handbook for would-be reformers.)

Above all, it requires conservatives to take ownership of prison reform, and correct the system they helped build. The Democrats still lack credibility on crime policy. Any successful reform requires the support of the law-and-order party.

To their credit, some Republican lawmakers (many of them religious conservatives) are already hard at work on this issue.

But the case of Maurice Clemmons may cast a long shadow over conservative politics, frightening politicians away from even the most sensible reforms — lest they wake up to a tragedy, and find themselves assigned the blame.

Source

Turkey's HQ for European Union membership drive is a confiscated Orthodox school

‘Little Caliph’ Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Islamist AK Party government want Turkey to join the EU, but clearly still intend to play by their Islamic supremacist rules:

Unbelievable but true: the headquarters of the Secretariat for the entry of Turkey into the European Union is a building confiscated from the Orthodox Christian community in the 90s. The building is located in Istanbul, in the well-known area of Ortakoy, under the first bridge over the Bosphorus.

Before the seizure, the building was used as a primary school for children of the minority Orthodox in Ortakoy. Here, once lived a thriving Orthodox community, now non-existent because of past purges against minorities, executed by the “secular” Turkish State.

Read the rest here.
Hat tip to Damian Thompson

Memory Eternal

My step-mother Nadeen reposed in the Lord late this afternoon. Those who have been following this blog will recall that she suffered a severe stroke in March from which she never recovered. Although I was not able to arrive in time I take comfort in the knowledge that she was surrounded by family and loved ones at the time of her death. I want to thank the many people who have emailed or posted prayers for her and my family over the months since her illness struck. Your kindness and spiritual support has been a source of inexpressible comfort. As my family deals with all of those things which must be done in the next few days I humbly ask for your continued intercession in this difficult time.

Yours with deepest gratitude,
John

Prayer Request

My step-mother Nadeen who had a major stroke in March has taken a turn for the worse. She has been in the hospital since Wednesday with various issues and developed a staff infection since then. Late last night she was moved to the Critical Care Unit. Your prayers are coveted and deeply appreciated.

Some quick economic thoughts and an update

First my computer problem continues. It appears that I am going to have to take it to the computer doctor ($$$) and attempt an emergency reboot. Worse case scenario would mean that I am going to have to go through a major effort at file recovery. uggg

On a somewhat happier note the economic picture (nationally) is looking up, even if only a bit. Unemployment appears to be levelling off. The news was initially greeted with fireworks on Wall Street this morning (DOW up 150 at one point) but the US Dollar Index rallied on the news as well, as investors began questioning if this could lead to an earlier than expected tightening by the FED. This sent a chill down the Street as nervous investors fearing that the easy money rally could be coming to an end fled equities. At the end of the day the dollar was up well over 1% and most of the major equities indices were flat having given up all or most of the earlier gains. Commodities were down sharply with gold getting hammered.

My take on all this?

This was a huge overreaction to a (for the moment) imaginary threat. Ben Bernanke has made it abundantly clear that the only thing which is going to make him start tightening monetary policy is a significant spike in inflation. And while the reports on CPI (a little over 3%) from earlier this week are not good they are not enough to ground helicopter Ben. Nor is the current employment report which lowered the official unemployment rate to 10% from 10.2.%. He is well aware that the true unemployment rate remains north of 17%. Barring a really sharp spike in the CPI; I see almost no chance of a meaningful hike in FED interest rates before the end of the 2nd quarter of 2010 and it could easily be much longer than that.

Mr. Bernanke is a student of the Great Depression (the first one) and is a firm believer in the Keynesian theory that the principal reason for the severity of that depression was the failure of the government to throw sufficient amounts of money at the problem and or a precipitous move to withdraw monetary and fiscal stimulus (1936 and 1937). I would and of course do disagree. But this is the main reason why I remain highly skeptical of the almost hysterical fears that a major tightening of monetary policy is closer than expected on the heels of today's employment figures. It is not.

So where do we go from here?

I continue to believe that the carry trade is a good move for the near to intermediate term. Gold got hammered today on the dollar's rally. But gold has been moving in a near straight line for almost three months. Frankly markets don't move in a straight line (when they do it's time to get out). This is an overdue correction that I have been predicting for a while. It may last for a few more days before levelling off. At some point though the dollar will resume its death by a thousand cuts. I think gold is a buy during the current correction, though I would scale in as it is very possible that there could still be some significant short term downside.

Could I be wrong? Of course. A stop loss (or preserve profits) price should be built in. If the correction dips below $1085 I would exit stage right until things firm up a bit.

Beyond gold I like any diverse selection of foreign and domestic value oriented equities (for fund investors take a look at AMANX). I also like the Permanent Portfolio Fund (PRPFX). (Disclosure a substantial part of my IRA is in there). I would underweight exposure to long term US Dollar denominate fixed income securities, especially Treasuries which are high risk and low return right now. Even a modest reflation will produce a negative yield on them. For those interested in some speculative investments foreign bonds and emerging markets are potential sources for significant gains. I like TGBAX and VEIEX.

There is an enormous amount of subjects I would like to be posting on but time constraints (I am still stuck on public access computers at the library) make blogging difficult right now. I do however have some hopes that things will be back up in the coming week. I am not sure I will be on tomorrow. If not have a great weekend. I will definitley try to get online no later than Monday.

Please Stand By: We are experiencing technical difficulties

Well, I got home late yesterday afternoon and the computer has apparently decided it needs more than a weekend off. I am posting this from a computer at the public library. Yes this means that as of right now I have no regular internet connection. So please go easy on emails unless they are urgent (I am time limited to an hour here). I am not sure how serious the problem is. But it looks like a major crash right now. More to follow as time permits.

Hang on: It could be an ugly day

We interrupt our scheduled down time to gently caution readers who care about such things that today (black Friday) is probably going to be a tough one on Wall St. There has been a very steep sell off in overseas markets on news that Dubai (and its principal development fund) is in serious danger of defaulting on its debt.

The Nikei Index is down over 3%, the Hang Seng is down almost 5%, The main European Exchanges which have just opened are dropping like a rock. As far as I can tell the only thing going up right now is the US Dollar (talk about resurrection from the dead) and closely related Treasuries. Commodities are getting hammered with oil down over 6%, gold down about 4% and silver reminds me of some road kill I have seen recently. DOW Futures are down around 300.

All of which brings to mind some sage advice I once got. In a panic the second one who yells "SELL!" is the first looser.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Barring something significant to report or discuss there will be little or no posting through the weekend. Also please be patient with emails as I anticipate being out of town. Have a great holiday and see you all on Monday.

In ICXC
John

Blagoslovi Dushe Moya Gospoda (Vespers)

NY Times book review: "History of Russia. XX Century"

A new two-volume history of Russia’s turbulent 20th century is being hailed inside and outside the country as a landmark contribution to the swirling debate over Russia’s past and national identity.

Written by 45 historians led by Andrei Zubov, a professor at the institute that serves as university to the Russian Foreign Ministry, the weighty history — almost 1,000 pages per volume — was published this year by AST Publishers and is already in its second printing of 10,000 copies.

Retailing at the rough equivalent of $20 a volume and titled “History of Russia. XX Century,” the books try to rise above ideologically charged clashes over Russia’s historical memory. They are critical both of czarist and Communist Russia, and incorporate the history of Russian emigration and the Russian Orthodox Church into the big picture of a chaotic, violent century. While written from a clearly Christian perspective — one author is a Russian Orthodox priest — the history avoids overt nationalism or anti-Semitism.

Eminent historians in the United States and Poland who often take a critical view of Russia’s passionate, partisan discussion of history lauded its balance.

“Nothing like it has ever been published in Russia,” Richard Pipes, the Harvard University Sovietologist, wrote in an e-mail message, noting that he was trying to raise money for a translation and publication in English. “It is a remarkable work: remarkable not only for Russia but also for Western readers. For one, it has gotten away from the nationalism so common in Russian history books, according to which the Russians were always the victims of aggression, never aggressors.”

Mr. Pipes noted that it made extensive use of Western sources — rare in Russia — and praised its attention to often overlooked questions of the role of morals and religious beliefs.

Read the rest here.

Australians are learning a lessson: Credit cards are a scam...

SYDNEY — When Steve Franklin bought four plane tickets on Qantas last June, he faced an unexpected expense: a surcharge of 7.70 Australian dollars on each of the 136.70 dollar ($126) tickets — just for using his Visa credit card.

Mr. Franklin, who planned to fly his parents and his 7-year-old twin daughters from Sydney to Adelaide, knew that changes to credit card rules had affected the cost of using plastic, but the extra 5.6 percent seemed excessive.

The charges were the consequence of changes in credit card rules in Australia that were aimed, in part, at reducing the cost of hidden fees for using plastic. But the law, passed six years ago, also allowed merchants to tack on new charges, and many have done just that, in some cases with fees that exceed the old ones.

Read the rest here.

Credit cards are a scam and the companies that issue them are crooks. With apologies to New Hampshire my motto is "Live debt free or die."

Evangelical Protestant Missionaries in Islamic nation converting... Coptic Orthodox Christians

CAIRO // As the largest religious minority in a nation of Muslims, Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Christians have long felt a sense of battered yet unimpeachable pride: their faith is strong, their institutions sound and, perhaps most importantly, their presence on the banks of the Nile predates Islam’s by several centuries.

But over the past few months, the Orthodox church’s traditionally defensive stance has turned to face a new opponent. Prominent Orthodox leaders have publicly accused Protestant Evangelicals – a Christian sect with strong roots in the United States – of recruiting Orthodox youth as part of a broader plot to evangelise Egypt’s estimated eight million Christians.

The growing row among Christian denominations has challenged old assumptions about the pre-eminence of the Orthodox faith in Egypt’s vibrant Christian life.

“There are many rules among [Christians]. One of the most important of these rules is not to recruit people from one church to another,” said Father Abdel Masiih Basiit, the pastor of St Mary’s Orthodox Church of Mostarid in Qalubiya, about an hour north of Cairo. “[The Evangelicals] did not respect this rule.”

While Evangelical leaders acknowledge that they receive financial backing from the United States – just as the Coptic church takes support from the Orthodox diaspora – they have fervently denied that there is any such recruitment scheme. Like any religious institution, community leaders say, Evangelicals welcome all those who want to learn more about their faith. To the extent that Evangelicals do proselytise, it is to those Christians whose faith has lapsed and who may lack allegiance to a specific Christian sect, say Protestant leaders.

Read the rest here.

Archbishop Vincent Nichols 'offered flowers at the altar of Hindu deities'

Damian Thompson has the story.

Navy SEALs Face Assault Charges for Capturing Most-Wanted Terrorist

Navy SEALs have secretly captured one of the most wanted terrorists in Iraq — the alleged mastermind of the murder and mutilation of four Blackwater USA security guards in Fallujah in 2004. And three of the SEALs who captured him are now facing criminal charges, sources told FoxNews.com.

The three, all members of the Navy's elite commando unit, have refused non-judicial punishment — called an admiral's mast — and have requested a trial by court-martial.

Ahmed Hashim Abed, whom the military code-named "Objective Amber," told investigators he was punched by his captors — and he had the bloody lip to prove it.

Now, instead of being lauded for bringing to justice a high-value target, three of the SEAL commandos, all enlisted, face assault charges and have retained lawyers.

Read the rest here.

I desperately want to comment on this. But I don't think I can without recourse to language that is not appropriate for a Christian blog.