Free kibbles

"From France to Poland, from the Czech Republic to China, many nations are rebuffing the president and offering little wiggle room for him to negotiate economic and security policies." But it's not just foreign leaders. American liberals are having the same reaction. '[O]ne of [Vanity Fair's] writers, media writer Michael Wolff, took an axe to the president, in a posting beginning “Sheesh, the guy is Jimmy Carter,” ending “This guy is leaden and this show is in trouble,” and titled “Barack Obama is a Terrible Bore."' Yet another shocker. That's because Obama appears incompetent, but really he's following his plan, just like Bush wasn't very bright, but he knew exactly what he wanted. Obama's going to regret following his Marxist dogma.

Hillary Clinton is right that the US bears significant responsibility for the drug violence in Mexico. Too bad she can't see the obvious solution - end the war on drugs - and advocates the exact wrong solution - escalating the war.

Geithner says he's open to China's suggestion of one world currency. Fortunately, Obama previously panned the idea, but we got another peak behind the curtain at the ideals of the Obama adminstration. Geithner also says the market can't solve our financial problems. Only a genius like him using the government's power of force can. I guess since bankruptcy requires the government, he's trivially right, but that's not what he means. These excepts are scary because Geithner seems to have no clue what really created this crisis, and his conceit that a handful of people can solve this problem using government force is religious, not rational.

Congress puts 2 million acres off limits for oil and gas drilling. That's going to bite us very shortly.

The Post Office isn't looking for a bailout. It's looking for a shortened work week. Why don't GM and Chrysler try that?

Unions and big government are crushing California, and this is the model Obama wants to force on the entire country.

FedEx is so concerned about the costs of being forced to unionize, it placed an order for 30 Boeing planes on hold. This is how creating overpriced union jobs costs more jobs elsewhere.

Green Senator Feinstein proves once again that the modern green movement is predominantly a Marxist movement that resists all human advancement by blocking solar and wind farms in California.

How does President Obama address the teleprompter criticism? By repositioning the teleprompter out of the camera view. That's the kind of window dressing change we can expect from Obama.

This resignation letter shows the kind of damage that happens to people when government starts dictating terms to companies.

Obama says he won't send US troops into Pakistan. I don't think I'd make that promise even if I never intended to put troops in there. Presidents should never take options off the table.

Now Obama wants us to believe he knows more about running an auto maker than the people who've been doing it their entire careers. There are so many classic lessons in this fiasco. The problems caused by big, bad government, in this case empowering labor unions to use force to build their numbers and loose monetary policy, always lead to bigger, worse government. This is classic central planning - dictating sacrifices to everybody - and a classic example of the fatal conceit of believing that 1 person or a handful of people can run the economy better by using government force than hundreds of millions of people running it through voluntarily transactions. To Obama and his cronies, it's just so easy and the management of the companies and unions is just too dumb to figure it out on their own.

Obama forces GM chairman to resign. I'm sure many people will say Obama's doing the right thing here. That may or may not be true, but even if it is true, then this should and would have happened long ago if government hadn't gotten involved and propped up these zombie car companies. The Chairman could have been long gone if GM had declared bankruptcy months ago. The contracts could have been renegotiated, factories sold off or closed and GM reorganized and on its way to profitability if government had stayed out of it and let the process work. We have a bankruptcy process for a reason, and it should have been allowed to work.

Reason's analysis of Geithner's TARP II toxic asset purchase program shows that taxpayers assume 93 percent of the risk while private investors assume only 7 percent. This will lead investors to overpay for the assets, artificially inflating them long enough for banks to fix their balance sheets, then the taxpayers can eat the losses on many of them. Thanks, government. It's just another flavor of corporate welfare. All the aristocrats are in a hurry to spend trillions of dollars we don't have, but the studies of the mark-to-market accounting rule won't be finished for months. I have a better solution: change the mark-to-market accounting rule, that's what triggered this entire mess, we'll examine the consequences and call it a study, and stop putting us trillions more in debt.

Regulators plan to relax the mark-to-market accounting rule in April. April? Why not today? Why not last April when we saw the damage? The problem with applying the mark-to-market account rule to these toxic assets is that the toxic assets are a mix of slices of bad mortgages and good mortgages. The good mortgages are still worth something, but because of the way the mortgages are sliced and bundled, with slices of good and bad mortgages bundled together, nobody can tell how to price the assets. Therefore nobody will buy them, and the mark-to-market accounting rule forces banks to value them at effectively zero. You watch. After trillions have been allocated by the government and the Fed in an attempt to free up the credit markets, changing this mark-to-market accounting rule will make all the difference, and that will end up being all that ever needed to be done from the very beginning.

George Will reports that TARP is unconstitutional because Congress cannot pass its responsibility to allocate funds to the executive branch. It seems to me this same argument applies to the FCC, the FDA and probably 100 other federal agencies.

The resurgence of nuclear power.

Ralph Peters nails it when he says Obama's Afghanistan policy sounds a lot like LBJ's Vietnam policy.

Want a truly fresh strategy that would work? End all support of any kind to Pakistan. Close our embassy. Do what makes military sense and reduce our forces in Afghanistan to a level that can be supplied by air. And concentrate on destroying al Qaeda, not on "owning" village X. (Obama's approach just stinks of Vietnam.)

Well said.

Speaking of NATO, Pat Buchanan says the US is stuck to the carcass of a dead policy. One of America's historic great strengths was our ability to adapt to fast changing situations. Our government has taken that strength from us along with many others.

House Republicans blow an opportunity to grab the initiative in the budget debate because of internal squabling. How long will Americans continue to empower these 2 failed parties?

Just back from knee surgery, Tiger Woods comes back from 5 strokes down to win. He shames every other golfer on the planet.