Now that the government is a shareholder in banks, Thomas Friedman lays out some possible unintended consequences:

Let’s imagine this scene: You are the president of one of these banks in which the government has taken a position. One day two young Stanford grads walk in your door. One is named Larry, and the other is named Sergey. They each are wearing jeans and a T-shirt. They tell you that they have this thing called a “search engine,” and they are naming it — get this — “Google.” They tell you to type in any word in this box on a computer screen and — get this — hit a button labeled “I’m Feeling Lucky.” Up comes a bunch of Web sites related to that word. Their start-up, which they are operating out of their dorm room, has exhausted its venture capital. They need a loan.

What are you going to say to Larry and Sergey as the president of the bank? “Boys, this is very interesting. But I have the U.S. Treasury as my biggest shareholder today, and if you think I’m going to put money into something called ‘Google,’ with a key called ‘I’m Feeling Lucky,’ you’re fresh outta luck. Can you imagine me explaining that to a Congressional committee if you guys go bust?”

And then what happens if the next day the congressman from Palo Alto, who happens to be on the House banking committee, calls you, the bank president, and says: “I understand you turned down my boys, Larry and Sergey. Maybe you haven’t been told, but I am one of your shareholders — and right now, I’m not feeling very lucky. You get my drift?”

Maybe nothing like this will ever happen. Maybe it’s just my imagination. But maybe not …

(H/T)

I really hope there’s a sunset provision to the government ownership of stock in the banks.  It could take decades to get the government out of the bank ownership business.

Hubbard posted this at 11:01 AM EDT on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 as George Bush Sucks!, It's Economics - Stupid!

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Fact 1: Oliver Stone keeps making movies that cover topics I’m interested in. See 1, 2, 3, 4.

Fact 2: Oliver Stone keeps making movies that bore me to death. See 1, 2, 3, 4. See again 1.

Fact 3: The previews for W. make it look interesting.

Fact 4: The previews for Alexander made it look interesting.

Fact 5: There is a fantastic movie to be made about George W. Bush. And it may include a [tiny] part of the left’s weird insistence that the last 8 years are best understood as a mediocre son trying to outdo his heroic father.

Fact 6: That movie will not be made by Oliver Stone.

Existential Whine 1: Why must the Hollywood director whose interests most closely correspond to mine be an unrepentant Communist?

Apollo posted this at 7:47 PM EDT on Monday, October 13th, 2008 as Ourselves, George Bush Rules!, George Bush Sucks!, Film Rants

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Dr. Krauthammer is on the record as not being a fan of Sarah Palin.  So it’s telling that he now comes to her defense:

There is no single meaning of the Bush doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one succeeding another over the eight years of this administration — and the one Charlie Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today. It is utterly different.

He asked Palin, “Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?”

She responded, quite sensibly to a question that is ambiguous, “In what respect, Charlie?”

Sensing his “gotcha” moment, Gibson refused to tell her. After making her fish for the answer, Gibson grudgingly explained to the moose-hunting rube that the Bush doctrine “is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense.”

Wrong.

I know something about the subject because, as the Wikipedia entry on the Bush doctrine notes, I was the first to use the term. In the cover essay of the June 4, 2001, issue of the Weekly Standard entitled, “The Bush Doctrine: ABM, Kyoto, and the New American Unilateralism,” I suggested that the Bush administration policies of unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM treaty and rejecting the Kyoto protocol, together with others, amounted to a radical change in foreign policy that should be called the Bush doctrine.

Then came 9/11, and that notion was immediately superseded by the advent of the war on terror. In his address to the joint session of Congress nine days after 9/11, President Bush declared: “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.” This “with us or against us” policy regarding terror — first deployed against Pakistan when Secretary of State Colin Powell gave President Musharraf that seven-point ultimatum to end support for the Taliban and support our attack on Afghanistan — became the essence of the Bush doctrine.

Until Iraq. A year later, when the Iraq war was looming, Bush offered his major justification by enunciating a doctrine of preemptive war. This is the one Charlie Gibson thinks is the Bush doctrine.

It’s not. It’s the third in a series and was superseded by the fourth and current definition of the Bush doctrine, the most sweeping formulation of the Bush approach to foreign policy and the one that most clearly and distinctively defines the Bush years: the idea that the fundamental mission of American foreign policy is to spread democracy throughout the world. It was most dramatically enunciated in Bush’s second inaugural address: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”

For what little it’s worth, the first, second, and third Bush doctrines still seem reasonable to me.  It’s the fourth that’s problematic, since a majority of the people can be wrong a majority of the time.

Hubbard posted this at 10:04 AM EDT on Saturday, September 13th, 2008 as George Bush Rules!, George Bush Sucks!, Kraut-hammered

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A New York-based publication sees McCain’s words for Tom Ridge and makes inferences about who will be McCain’s veep. I see them and am curious, after his stint at DHS, is there anyone who’s wanting Ridge back in charge of an executive agency? Granted, it would have taken an administrative wizard to make DHS functional during those first few years. But Ridge made the least of his opportunity.

Apollo posted this at 6:19 PM EDT on Monday, August 11th, 2008 as George Bush Sucks!, Audacity of Hype

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One of the things I’ve always found most attractive about McCain is that he has all of President Bush’s resolve in the war on terror without the weird excesses.  Jacob Sullum has evidence that I may have been wrong in this:

…I noted that John McCain seemed to have a less expansive view of presidential authority than George W. Bush. Now the distance between them seems to be shrinking. In a recent letter to National Review Online, McCain adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin reported that the Arizona senator believes President Bush acted within his constitutional authority when he violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by approving warrantless monitoring of international communications involving people in the United States. According to Holtz-Eakin, who was responding to an NRO post by Andrew McCarthy that questioned whether McCain was sufficiently supportive of Bush’s position on this issue, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate believes “neither the Administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the ACLU and the trial lawyers, understand were  Constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001.”

Holtz-Eakin added that as president, “John McCain will do everything he can to protect Americans from [terrorist] threats, including asking the telecoms for appropriate assistance to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United States as authorized by Article II of the Constitution.” The reference to Article II clearly implies that McCain would feel free to violate any statute he believed impeded his ability to conduct anti-terrorist surveillance.

…

There is no ambiguity as to whether FISA required warrants for the sort of surveillance Bush authorized the National Security Agency to conduct, and the argument that Congress unintentionally amended FISA when it authorized the use of military force against Al Qaeda and the Taliban does not pass the laugh test. The only real issue is whether the president has the constitutional authority to disregard statutes such as FISA when they get in the way of actions he considers necessary to prevent terrorist attacks. In December, McCain said the president does not have that authority; now he says “there’s ambiguity about it.”

Dammit, John.  When it comes down to it, the actual wiretapping probably isn’t the hugest deal in the world, though I’ll add that that hardly makes it right.  What kills me about the whole business, though, is that the president — upon realizing that the FISA bill was antiquated and unduly impeded necessary surveillances of terrorists — decided to simply ignore it.  It never even crossed their minds to go to Congress and say, “Hey, this FISA thing is a disaster.  We need to change it.”  Unfortunately, this sort of “It’s my constitution, I’ll do what I want!” attitude is perfectly justified in America today, so long as you can plausibly tie it to fighting terrorism.

Tom posted this at 11:38 AM EDT on Thursday, June 12th, 2008 as George Bush Sucks!, Audacity of Hype, Liberty and/or Security

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If you’ve ever read David Frum’s How We Got Here, two things that strike you are both his sympathy for people in situations that they can’t understand and his omnivorous learning.  He has an uncanny knack for tying small issues together with large ones and thus illustrating a common concept.

Something has long been wrong with the Bush administration; this we all know.  The question has been, what specifically is wrong?  Frum’s answer: personnel is policy, and the way Bush manages people weeds out good people.  (Frum himself was on staff, but lasted less than two years.)  How did Scott McClellan go from a political hack in Texas to the White House press office to the hottest thing on amazon.com?  From Frum’s National Post column:

As the current press secretary Dana Perino daily reminds us, you don’t have to be a genius to succeed as press secretary. But you do need (1) composure under fire, (2) verbal fluency, (3) an understanding of the imperatives of the news business and (4) access to the interior workings of the administration. McClellan never possessed qualities (1) and (2), and his colleagues refused to grant him (4).
In these deficiencies, McClellan was not alone. George W. Bush brought most of his White House team with him from Texas. Except for Karl Rove, these Texans were a strikingly inadequate bunch. Harriet Miers, Alberto Gonzalez, Karen Hughes, Al Hawkins, Andy Card (the last not a Texan, but a lifelong Bush family retainer) — they were more like characters from The Office than the sort of people one would expect to find at the supreme height of government in the world’s most powerful nation. McClellan, too, started in Bush’s governor’s office, and if he never belonged to the innermost circle of power, he nonetheless gained closer proximity than would be available to almost anyone who did not first serve in Texas.
That early team was recruited with one paramount consideration in mind: loyalty. Theoretically, it should be possible to combine loyalty with talent. But that did not happen often with the Bush team.
Bush demanded a very personal kind of loyalty, a loyalty not to a cause or an idea, but to him and his own career. Perhaps unconsciously, he tested that loyalty with constant petty teasing, sometimes verging on the demeaning. (Robert Draper, whose book Dead Certain offers a vivid picture of the pre-presidential Bush, tells the story of a 1999 campaign-strategy meeting at which Bush shut Karl Rove up by ordering him to “hang up my jacket.” The room fell silent in shock — but Rove did it.)
These little abuses would often be followed by unexpected acts of thoughtfulness and generosity. Yet the combination of the demand for personal loyalty, the bullying and the ensuing compensatory love-bombing was to weed out strong personalities and to build an inner circle defined by a willingness to accept absolute subordination to the fluctuating needs of a tense, irascible and unpredictable chief.
Had Bush been a more active manager, these subordinated personalities might have done him less harm. But after choosing people he could dominate, he then delegated them enormous power. He created a closed loop in which the people entrusted with the most responsibility were precisely those who most dreaded responsibility — Condoleezza Rice being the most important and most damaging example.

In one column, Frum has explained how so many momentous decisions fell into the hands of people who, like Bartleby the Scrivener, would prefer not to.  In short, Frum has explained why What Happened happened.  Frum has already written one book where he explained what he thought was good and bad about this presidency; I hope he writes another, now that we know more.

Hubbard posted this at 9:50 AM EDT on Saturday, May 31st, 2008 as George Bush Sucks!, Politics, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior

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